9th Circuit Rules That Muslim Woman Can Sue About Hijab Removal

It’s astonishing that allowing this suit was even a question.

In 2000 Congress passed a law that prohibits the government from imposing a “substantial burden” on prisoners’ religious practices unless a compelling reason can be shown that the restrictions are necessary.

One would have thought the law would logically come into play with the Orange County woman, Souhair Khatib, who was made to take off her head scarf for “security reasons” while she waited in a Santa Ana courthouse holding cell. Whether or not the court had a “compelling reason” to make Khatib take off her hijab would be a matter for a jury to decide. But surely the lawsuit itself would be valid under the 2000 law.

However a lower court ruled that it was not.

Here are some of the details, courtesy of the San Francisco Chronicle:

Khatib and her husband pleaded guilty in 2006 to a misdemeanor welfare crime, which Kieffer said involved receiving overpayments. They were placed on probation and ordered to perform 30 hours of community service apiece.

When they went to court to ask for an extension of the community service deadline, a judge revoked their probation and put them in holding cells, where deputies ordered Khatib to remove her hijab.

She stayed in the cell most of the day, trying to cover her head with her vest. When she was brought into court, the judge extended the deadline and restored her probation.

Khatib says her religion forbids her to expose her head or neck to men outside her immediate family. She sued the county for damages.

County officials argued that the law covered only prisons and other institutions that hold inmates for substantial periods, and not to the courthouse cells where those awaiting criminal proceedings can be kept for up to 12 hours.

A federal judge followed by a three-judge panel from the 9th Circuit panel agreed with the county and ordered the suit dismissed.

The ACLU, which represented Khatib, was outraged. “By that logic,” read the ACLU’s statment, ” the county would be required by law to protect a person’s religious rights while detained in a jail, but not when the same person was transported to and held in the holding facility of a courthouse before and after making court appearances. This would be an absurd result.”

It was especially illogical since the both the U.S. Department of Justice and the California Department of Corrections recognize and protect a Muslim woman’s right to wear her hijab. So why does Orange County suddenly become special?

Judge Alex Kozinski, who was the lone dissenter out of the three judge panel, went further. He wrote:

Freud is reported to have said that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. And a facility used for holding prisoners prior to trial is a pretrial detention facility. The Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUIPA) covers prisoners held in certain kinds of institutions—defined to include both correctional facilities (such as prisons and jails) and pretrial detention facilities. Souhair Khatib was held in a facility where prisoners are routinely detained awaiting trial and other court appearances. She was therefore held in a facility covered by RLUIPA and is entitled to its protections. This pretty much sums up the case for me.

Duh!

Fortunately, the full 9th Circuit agreed to hear the case.

The Obama administration also joined with a brief arguing that the law applied to courthouse holding cells.

Finally, on Tuesday afternoon, the 9th Circuit handed down an 11-0 decision reinstating Souhair Khatib’s lawsuit against Orange County.

The decision doesn’t guarantee a verdict, it just says that she has grounds to sue—-which would seem to be a no-brainer.

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AND ELSEWHERE IN THE NEWS…..THE SXSW STORY ZOOMING AROUND TWITTER ON TUESDAY AMONG JOURNALISTS AND WRITERS WAS THIS ONE HAVING TO DO WITH NEWS ETHICS

It all started when former LA Weekly writer, Alexia Tsotsis, now writing for Tech Crunch, was at SXSW where she wrote an article on the new movie Source Code.

Then the problems began, as Tsotsis herself explains it.

Earlier this week I interviewed Duncan Jones and Jake Gyllenhaal at SXSW, at the press junket for their movie The Source Code. While the film doesn’t have a huge tech angle other than the title, I thought it might be good video content for TCTV—the intersection of Hollywood and Silicon Valley is fascinating, and the movie industry is one of the last to get disrupted. It’s always interesting to see how old school media players are aware of the monumental shifts going on in their own industry.

In any case I thought that the way The Source Code and Summit Entertainment were trying to target the tech press and, through us, our more social media savvy readers was an intriguing marketing strategy—and an angle! I wrote my “Jake Gyllenhaal Movie ‘The Source Code’ Markets Itself To Techies“ post about that instead of turning it into a free ad for the film.

Apparently, the post was not enough of a blowjob for Summit, and they let it be known to the AOL person at Moviefone who hooked us up with them in the first place. This morning I received this email from that Moviefone/AOL Television representative….

Read the rest here. You won’t want to miss it.