Inmate's religious freedom case fails on appeal

Prisoners have some rights, but they do not have all the rights that everyone else has. Federal judges will defer to the judgment of prison officials when it comes to restricting certain inmate freedoms. That does not mean the inmate always wins, but it stacks the deck against them. What also stacks the deck is qualified immunity, which ends the case in the defendant's favor if he did not violate clearly established case law. That is what happened here.

The case is Gonzalez v. Morris, a summary order issued on September 10. Plaintiff sued under the First Amendment's free exercise clause, claiming that officials violated his religious freedoms by prohibiting him from wearing more than one strand of beads around his neck while confined in the special housing unit (also known as solitary confinement) even though the Santeria religion requires him to wear additional strands. He also says the jail violated the Equal Protection Clause because, while Native American inmates could burn herbs for religious reasons, plaintiff was not allowed to do the same. The jail got summary judgment on the free exercise claim, and a jury ruled for the jail on the equal protection claim.

Starting with the necklace/beads claim under the free exercise clause, the Court of Appeals (Lohier, Katzmann and Walker) says plaintiff must lose because there is no Second Circuit case holding that an inmate has a First Amendment right to wear more than one strand of religious beads in the special housing unit, or to use matches or a lighter to burn offerings. While the cases do hold that inmates have the right to practice their religion unless their religious practices interfere with the safe and efficient management of the facility, qualified immunity requires a case that falls within the plaintiff's fact pattern. If such a case exists, the defendant is on constructive notice that he is violating the law. Otherwise, the defendant gets the benefit of the doubt. This immunity paradigm applies not only to jail cases but to any constitutional case involving municipal or governmental defendants.

What about plaintiff's challenge to the jury verdict? That also fails. The Second Circuit notes that there is a split within the Second Circuit itself over whether you can even appeal an order denying your motion for a new trial on sufficiency of the evidence grounds. Compare Rasanen v. Doe, 723 F.3d 325 (2d Cir. 2013) with ING Global v. Oasis Supply Corp., 757 F.3d 92 (2d Cir. 2014). But the Court does not resolve that conflict in this case because it finds that plaintiff lost the trial on the basis of credibility issues, which are almost never reviewable on appeal in any event.