Courts rule on religious land use law for prisons

The U.S. Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals has upheld religious rights of prisoners under a three-year-old federal law, contradicting a month-old ruling from another circuit.

In a unanimous opinion, a three-judge panel of the Fourth Circuit overturned a federal court ruling that the inmates’ portion of the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUIPA) violates the constitutional ban on government establishment of religion. The decision came only a month after a Sixth Circuit panel ruled the prisoners’ section of RLUIPA constitutes an establishment of religion.

The latest ruling gives RLUIPA a 3–1 advantage at the federal appeals court level. The Seventh and Ninth circuits have ruled RLUIPA does not violate the establishment clause but accommodates the religious rights of prisoners. If the full Sixth Circuit does not overrule its panel, it would increase the potential for the Supreme Court to rule on the law. In November, the high court declined to hear an appeal of the Ninth Circuit’s opinion.

The Sixth Circuit relied partly upon the federal judge’s ruling in the Fourth Circuit case in its opinion striking down RLUIPA. In his January opinion, federal Judge James Turk of Roanoke, Va., ruled RLUIPA promoted religion unconstitutionally by providing greater protection to religious rights than to other basic rights.

Ira Madison, an inmate in a Virginia prison, sued the state and the department of corrections when department administrators refused his request for a kosher diet. Since 2000, Madison has declared his membership in the Church of God and Saints of Christ in Suffolk, Va. The church’s members, who say they follow God but do not worship Jesus, keep the Old Testament’s dietary laws, which prohibit pork and other foods.

The Fourth Circuit’s Dec. 8 opinion overturning Turk’s ruling, however, said the establishment clause “does not mandate that when Congress relieves the burdens of regulation on one fundamental right, that it must similarly reduce government burdens on all other rights.”

Congress “has not sponsored religion or become actively involved in religious activity, and RLUIPA in no way is attempting to indoctrinate prisoners in any particular belief or to advance religion in general in the prisons,” Fourth Circuit Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson wrote for the panel. “Congress has simply lifted government burdens on religious exercise and thereby facilitated free exercise of religion for those who wish to practice their faiths.” (BP)