Opinion ID: 784475
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Ford's Sincerely Held Religious Belief

Text: 25 In free exercise cases, scrutiny of the prisoner's sincerity is often essential in differentiating between those beliefs that are held as a matter of conscience and those that are animated by motives of deception and fraud. Patrick, 745 F.2d at 157. The district court, however, did not doubt Ford's sincerity, finding Ford's belief that the Eid ul Fitr feast is critical to his observance as a practicing Muslim to be sincere. See Ford, 230 F.Supp.2d at 345. Moreover, defendants have not challenged Ford's sincerity on appeal. 26 The district court nevertheless held that Ford's individualized, subjective beliefs are not entitled to First Amendment protection in light of the testimony of the DOCS religious authorities that Ford's belief did not comport with Islam's actual requirements. Id. at 347. Weighing the unanimity of the DOCS religious authorities' opinion that the feast, when not held within the three days immediately following Ramadan, was no longer of religious significance, against Ford's assertion to the contrary, the district court held that the balance tipped decidedly in favor of the defendants, and that Ford's beliefs did not warrant constitutional protection. Id. 27 In order to reach that conclusion, the district court distinguished Jackson v. Mann, 196 F.3d 316, 320-21 (2d Cir.1999), in which we held that a prisoner's subjective sincerely held belief that he is a Jew constitutionally entitles him to a kosher diet, as applicable only in cases in which the question is whether or not a person is a member of an organized religion. As the question presented in the instant case is not whether Ford is or is not a Muslim, the district court found Jackson inapplicable. See Ford, 230 F.Supp.2d at 346-48. As discussed below, we find this reading of Jackson untenably narrow in light of existing free exercise jurisprudence. 28 Ford argues on appeal that the district court impermissibly substituted an objective test for the subjective test articulated by the Supreme Court in Frazee v. Illinois Department of Employment Security, 489 U.S. 829, 109 S.Ct. 1514, 103 L.Ed.2d 914 (1989). In Frazee, the Supreme Court unanimously held that it was a violation of an individual's free exercise rights to deny that person benefits pursuant to an Illinois statute that rendered ineligible persons who failed, without good cause, ... to accept suitable work when offered.... Id. at 830, 109 S.Ct. 1514. There, the complainant William Frazee had failed to take a job for the sole reason that it would have required him to compromise his sincere belief that his religion forbade work on a Sunday. Id. at 833-34, 109 S.Ct. 1514. The Illinois state courts had rejected Frazee's claim on the ground that the prohibition against Sunday work was not found in any tenet or dogma of an established religious sect to which Frazee claimed membership. Id. at 831, 109 S.Ct. 1514. 29 The Supreme Court rejected the state courts' reasoning, stating that none of its prior free exercise decisions turned on a plaintiff's membership in a particular sect or on any tenet of the sect involved. Id. at 832-33, 109 S.Ct. 1514. Indeed, the Court made clear that in a factually similar case, Thomas v. Review Board of Indiana Employment Security Division, 450 U.S. 707, 101 S.Ct. 1425, 67 L.Ed.2d 624 (1981), disagreement among sect members over the issue of whether work was prohibited on the Sabbath had not prevented the Court from finding a free exercise violation based on the claimant's unquestionably [ ] sincere belief that his religion prevented him from working. Frazee, 489 U.S. at 833, 109 S.Ct. 1514. Having laid this groundwork, the Court quickly rejected an objective test for free exercise protection: 30 [W]e reject the notion that to claim the protection of the Free Exercise Clause, one must be responding to the commands of a particular religious organization. Here, Frazee's refusal was based on a sincerely held religious belief. Under our cases, he was entitled to invoke First Amendment protection. 31 Id. at 834, 109 S.Ct. 1514. The Court then supplied a limiting principle to guide the application of this broad subjective test, stating that an asserted belief might be `so bizarre, so clearly nonreligious in motivation, as not to be entitled to protection....' Id. at 834 n. 2, 109 S.Ct. 1514 (quoting Thomas, 450 U.S. at 715, 101 S.Ct. 1425). 32 In many respects, the Supreme Court's opinion in Frazee mirrored this Court's approach to free exercise claims previously articulated in Patrick v. LeFevre, 745 F.2d 153 (2d Cir.1984). Vernon Patrick was an inmate whose request to organize a religious group was refused by prison officials who did not believe that Patrick's beliefs constituted a religion. We reversed the district court's grant of summary judgment in favor of defendants, noting that courts have jettisoned the objective, content-based approach previously employed to define religious belief, in favor of a more subjective definition of religion, which examines an individual's inward attitudes towards a particular belief system. Id. at 157 (internal citations and quotations omitted). We also emphasized that [t]he freedom to exercise religious beliefs cannot be made contingent on the objective truth of such beliefs. Id. 33 We also have employed a subjective test to evaluate the free exercise claims of prisoners in two more recent cases. See Jolly v. Coughlin, 76 F.3d 468 (2d Cir.1996); Jackson, 196 F.3d at 316. In Jolly, the plaintiff inmate claimed his Rastafarian beliefs were unconstitutionally burdened when he was forced into keeplock after refusing to subject himself to prison-mandated tests for latent tuberculosis (TB). 7 The plaintiff claimed that, under the tenets of his religion, it was a sin to take artificial substances into his body. See Jolly, 76 F.3d at 476. The defendants argued in response that the TB test was derived from natural proteins, rather than artificial substances. Id. Thus, the question presented was whether the plaintiff's sincere belief that the TB test violated his religion was legally protected in light of objective, scientific evidence that the test was not artificial. 34 We refused to evaluate the objective reasonableness of the prisoner's belief, holding that our scrutiny extends only to whether a claimant sincerely holds a particular belief and whether the belief is religious in nature. Id. In upholding the plaintiff's claim, we made clear that to apply an objective test in such cases would require courts to resolve questions that are beyond their competence: 35 [C]ourts are not permitted to ask whether a particular belief is appropriate or true — however unusual or unfamiliar the belief may be. While it is a delicate task to evaluate religious sincerity without questioning religious verity, our free exercise doctrine is based upon the premise that courts are capable of distinguishing between these two questions.... We have no competence to examine whether plaintiff's belief has objective validity. 36 Id. (emphasis removed). 37 With this understanding of the sweep of the Constitution's free exercise guarantee, we consider Jackson, the case upon which the district court largely relied in disposing of the instant case. Nathaniel Jackson, a prisoner who identified himself as Jewish, requested a kosher diet. See Jackson, 196 F.3d at 317. The defendants denied Jackson's request after the prison rabbi advised officials that Jackson objectively was not a Jew. Id. at 318. The district court granted summary judgment to defendants, id. at 319, but we reversed, holding that the question whether Jackson's beliefs are entitled to Free Exercise protection turns on whether they are `sincerely held,' not on the `ecclesiastical question' whether he is in fact a Jew under Judaic law. Id. at 321 (citations and quotations omitted in original). We made no suggestion in Jackson — nor could we have in light of preceding cases — that the First Amendment protects only a prisoner's sincerely held religious belief that he is a member of an established religion. Ford, 230 F.Supp.2d at 347. 38 The district court thus erred in reading Jackson in so limited a fashion. Nothing in Jackson, or the cases on which its holding relied, permitted the district court to assess the objective validity of Ford's belief that the Eid ul Fitr feast carried religious significance even when postponed. By looking behind Ford's sincerely held belief, the district court impermissibly confronted what is, in essence, the ecclesiastical question of whether, under Islam, the postponed meal retained religious meaning. Cf. Hernandez v. Comm'r of Internal Revenue, 490 U.S. 680, 699, 109 S.Ct. 2136, 104 L.Ed.2d 766 (1989) (It is not within the judicial ken to question the centrality of particular beliefs or practices to a faith, or the validity of particular litigants' interpretations of those creeds. ) (emphasis added). 39 The opinions of the DOCS religious authorities cannot trump the plaintiff's sincere and religious belief. 8 For purposes of summary judgment, we must accept the district court's finding that Ford sincerely believes that celebration of the Eid ul Fitr — including the Eid ul Fitr prayer and the Eid ul Fitr feast — is critical to his observance as a practicing Muslim, Ford, 230 F.Supp.2d at 345, and hold that any perceived lack of objective validity to Ford's belief did not entitle defendants to judgment as a matter of law.