Focus on Indian Law
Knight v. Thompson Revisited: Ramirez v. Collier’s Implications for Native Prisoners’ Religious Exercise By Emily deLisle
Emily deLisle is a Cozen Voting Rights Fellow at the Native American Rights Fund in Washington, D.C. She graduated from the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School in 2021.
The U.S. Supreme Court’s March 24, 2022, decision in Ramirez v. Collier1 underscored the powerful protections the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUIPA) can offer incarcerated people who seek religious exemptions from generally applicable prison policies. In many respects, Ramirez merely reaffirmed the approach to RLUIPA the Court had already adopted in its 2015 Holt v. Hobbs2 decision. But, seven years later, the Eleventh Circuit’s decision in Knight v. Thompson—a ruling inconsistent with RLUIPA’s plain meaning, the Supreme Court’s instructions on remand, and even the Eleventh Circuit’s own applications of RLUIPA in subsequent cases—continues to deny Native people incarcerated in nonfederal facilities the right to practice their faith, as non-Native prisoners enjoy. Ramirez provides an opportunity to address Knight’s discriminatory application of RLUIPA to claims by Native prisoners as well as the unjust state prison policies that Knight sanctions. Congress passed RLUIPA two decades ago to establish “very broad protection for religious liberty.”3 RLUIPA, like the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), establishes a strict-scrutiny-like framework, providing that once an incarcerated plaintiff demonstrates that prison policy or practice imposes a substantial burden on his religious exercise, the state must demonstrate that the policy as applied to that individual is the least restrictive means of furthering a compelling government interest. But, in 2013, when the Eleventh Circuit considered RLUIPA claims brought by Native American prisoners against the Alabama Department of Corrections (ADOC) in Knight, its approach all but negated the statute’s narrow tailoring requirement. ADOC conceded that Alabama’s short hair requirement for male inmates substantially burdened the Native prisoners’ religious exercise. As the plaintiffs’ expert explained at trial, “hair has great religious significance for many Native Americans, and … forcing Native Americans to cut their long hair would amount to an ‘assault on
their sacredness.’” It was also undisputed that the state defendants’ asserted interests in “security, discipline, hygiene[,] and safety within the prisons and in the public’s safety in the event of [prisoner] escapes,” were, in principle, “compelling.”4 The question, then, was whether ADOC had adequately demonstrated that a total prohibition on unshorn hair was the least restrictive means of furthering its interests. The Knight Court ruled that it had, thereby upholding ADOC’s policy and refusing the plaintiffs’ requested exemption permitting them to wear their hair unshorn. This decision rested on three questionable lines of reasoning. First, the Eleventh Circuit extended an extraordinary degree of deference to the state defendants. The Knight Court’s analysis of RLUIPA’s narrow tailoring requirement elevated the Supreme Court’s dicta in Cutter v. Wilkinson—observing that some members of Congress had expected courts faced with RLUIPA claims to afford “due deference to the experience and expertise of prison and jail administrators”5—to a “deference mandate.”6 Applying this deferential standard, the Court concluded that a factual record that contained no statistical evidence and little relevant anecdotal evidence to establish the necessity of its categorical ban on long hair “amply support[ed]” ADOC’s position that there was no less restrictive method of protecting its asserted interests. Much of the defense’s testimony consisted of prison officials’ speculation about the theoretical risks of long hair on male prisoners. Witnesses stated that “prisoners could pull one another’s hair during fights” and “non-exempt inmates might attack exempted inmates out of jealousy for their special long-hair privilege” (emphasis added). The “most thorough defense of the ADOC’s hair length policy” came from a former prison director who “opined that his short-hair policy was a factor in his successful restoration of order and control in Virginia’s prison system.” He cited the “1999 escape of a … prison inmate who had cut his hair to alter his appearance”— July/August 2022 • THE FEDERAL LAWYER • 15
