Case Summary
Prisoners are not popular, but they are human. That is why Becket defends religious freedom for prisoners.
In 2000, Congress discovered that government bureaucrats were routinely trampling religious freedom in prison. They were needlessly confiscating sacred texts, breaking up worship meetings, and banning religious diets. So Congress unanimously passed a law that forbids arbitrary restrictions on religious freedom in prison.
Invoking that law, Becket defended the rights of religious prisoners in Florida for over a decade. Until July 2016, Florida’s was one of the last prison systems in the country that denied its inmates religious appropriate diets. Becket sued Florida twice over the denial of a kosher diet—first in 2002, then in 2012. Both times it received a favorable result on behalf of one Jewish prisoner. Then represented by the Department of Justice, the United States government itself sued the Florida Department of Corrections on behalf of all observant prisoners.
In 2015, a federal district court ordered Florida to begin providing kosher meals for all observant Jewish inmates, and the Department appealed to the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Becket, represented by the global law firm Jones Day, filed an amicus brief in March 2016 urging the protection of the religious rights of all prisoners. The brief points out that at least 35 states and the federal government provide kosher diets to Jewish prisoners, and there is no reason the Florida Department of Corrections can’t do the same. The court heard oral arguments in July 2016, and two days later it affirmed the district court’s order to provide religious diets for observant Jewish prisoners. In October 2016, in another case that Becket supported with an amicus brief, the Court ruled that the Department must provide a religious diet for a Muslim inmate.
Becket, which has successfully represented or supported religious prisoners in Georgia, Texas, Indiana, and in past Florida cases, has never lost a case concerning a prison system’s denial of religious diets. In 2015, it won a landmark, 9-0 ruling in favor of prisoners at the U.S. Supreme Court.