Court upholds law on prisoners' religious rights

WASHINGTON -- The Supreme Court yesterday unanimously upheld a law requiring prisons to provide worship time and ceremonial materials for a wide range of inmate religious practices, in a case that saw evangelical Christians and Orthodox Jews passionately back the rights of a Satanist, a witch, and members of a white-supremacist sect.

The decision was hailed as a major victory by religious activists, who considered it the most important faith issue on the Supreme Court's docket this year despite the greater attention paid to the dispute over whether the Ten Commandments may be displayed on public property.

Legal specialists said hundreds of federal, state, and local laws providing special accommodations for religious practices were at stake in the decision, because opponents of the prison statute -- including the US Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit -- claimed that making special accommodations for religious practices violated the constitutional separation of church and state.

Among the statutes in potential jeopardy were exceptions to drinking laws for minors who drink wine at Communion, exceptions to regulations allowing soldiers to wear items such as a yarmulke or a cross, and provisions exempting churches from many land-use regulations.

''It's really a thumping victory for the notion that the government may permissibly accommodate religious exercise," said Derek Gaubatz, director of litigation for the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, which filed a friend-of-the-court brief on behalf of 50 civil rights and religious groups.

Yesterday's decision upholds a 2000 law requiring state governments to meet the highest legal standard before refusing to accommodate a religious practice behind bars.

The law requires that lower courts consider inmates' religious requests on an individual basis, balancing the prisoner's freedom of religion against the prison's needs, such as maintaining order. The requests may still be denied if the government can prove that it has a compelling reason to do so.

''We do not read [the law] to elevate accommodation of religious observances over an institution's need to maintain order and safety," wrote Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. ''Our decisions indicate that an accommodation must be measured so that it does not override other significant interests."

Ohio solicitor general Douglas R. Cole, who argued the case before the Supreme Court, said that the state had challenged the law because officials feared that prisoners would make religious requests in order to acquire weapons or organize gangs.

Among the rejected religious requests, he said: a crystal sought by a Wiccan, which could be used as a weapon; racist literature sought by a member of a white supremacist church, which could incite racial violence; and instructions for writing in runes, an ancient Norse language, sought by a follower of the pagan religion Asatru, which could be used for coded gang communications. These cases will now be reconsidered in light of the court's decision.

''We were of course disappointed [with the ruling]," Cole said. ''At the same time, we were encouraged that the court expressly noted that these accommodationalist requests do present significant safety concerns, and that the court said that federal courts should defer to prison administrators in how best to meet those safety concerns."

Chris Eisgruber, provost of Princeton University and a specialist on law and religion, predicted that lower courts could interpret the decision in a way that would still give prison wardens wide latitude to decide when and whether to accommodate a prisoner's request for religious support.

Still, Carl Esbeck, a University of Missouri law professor and legal counsel to the National Association of Evangelicals, which supported the inmates, said the law will prevent wardens from arbitrarily denying certain items that pose no threat to anyone, such as kosher meals or most devotional literature.

On the other hand, he said, items such as candles could still be prohibited.

Gaubatz said he had monitored about 50 instances of inmate requests for accommodation under the law. Examples of cases in which the inmate prevailed, he said, include requests for kosher meals, prayer oil, and Islamic Friday prayer services. An example in which the inmate lost involved a request to use a menorah made of candles and glass.

Sometimes, he said, the prison and prisoner worked together to reach a mutually satisfactory solution.

''One prisoner wanted to wear a religious medallion that had particular meaning to him," Gaubatz said. ''The prison said no because it could be a gang signifier, which could lead to violence. Then [the law] came along, and they said you can wear it, but if you're in public areas of the prison, you have to wear it under your shirt. But you can still wear it, which is a less restrictive means of advancing security than banning it."

Cosponsored by Senators Orrin G. Hatch, Republican of Utah, and Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, the 2000 law was part of a nearly two decades-long struggle between Congress and the Supreme Court over how far the government should go in accommodating religious practices.

Recent Supreme Court decisions had sided against forcing the government to accommodate unusual religious requests. In 1987, the court allowed prisons to restrict Friday prayer services for Muslims. Three years later, the court upheld laws against the use of the drug peyote by Native Americans in a religious ritual, reasoning that so long as the law applies to everyone, it does not matter if it happens to burden a particular religion.

The two rulings incensed both civil libertarians and conservative Christians and Jews. Congress responded by passing the ''Religious Freedom Restoration Act," which said that all governments -- federal and state -- must accommodate religion.

But the Supreme Court struck down that law in 1997, saying Congress lacked the authority to impose the law on the states. It remained in effect for the federal government, however, and has been the standard in federal prisons for a decade.

In its next term, the Supreme Court is set to hear a case from New Mexico brought by a small group of Brazilian immigrants who want to drink a certain hallucinogenic tea, prohibited by federal drug laws, as part of their religious rituals.

The same conservative Christian and Jewish legal activist groups are also supporting the Brazilians in that case.

The mainstream religious leaders expect to receive some flack from their members for backing drug use by Brazilians.

''We take some criticism of 'Oh my gosh, we're supporting illegal drug use?' " said Esbeck. ''No, we're supporting a broad interpretation of religious freedom under these federal statutes. The only position of integrity, if we want religious freedom for ourselves, is we have to support religious freedoms for all of these groups. That means we have to support Brazilians who want to ingest a hallucinogen, or in this case, religious groups that are racist or anti-Semitic or Satanists."