Lawson v. Dugger, 86-5774
| Decision Date | 21 December 1987 |
| Docket Number | No. 86-5774,86-5774 |
| Citation | 840 F.2d 781 |
| Parties | Robert LAWSON, Plaintiff-Appellee, Cross-Appellant, v. Richard L. DUGGER, etc., et al., Defendants-Appellants, Cross-Appellees. |
| Court | U.S. Court of Appeals — Eleventh Circuit |
Carl J. Zahner, Jason Vail, Asst. Attys. Gen., Dept. of Legal Affairs, State of Fla., Tallahassee, Fla., for defendants-appellants, cross-appellees.
Peter M. Siegel, Florida Justice Institute, Inc., Miami, Fla., for plaintiff-appellee, cross-appellant.
Appeals from the United States District Court for the Southern District of Florida.
Before JOHNSON and ANDERSON, Circuit Judges, and ATKINS *, Senior District Judge.
Appellants, Florida prison officials, appeal from a judgment following a bench trial, holding unconstitutional the acts of the Florida Department of Corrections which restricted members of the class--prisoners--from access to the religious literature of the Hebrew Israelite faith and from otherwise exercising their right to religious expression within the prison context. The appellee cross-appellants also claimed their rights to due process were violated by the appellants' regulations and procedures for the screening of incoming religious literature.
The district court found, after recounting the evidence adduced at the trial, "that no incident of violence, racially oriented or otherwise, has occurred within the Florida prison system as a result of the introduction of Hebrew Israelite literature or the practice, by inmates, of the Hebrew Israelite religion." Memorandum Opinion at 14. The court determined that evidence which the appellants did proffer "consisted of speculation and predictions by various prison officials and expert witnesses that the banned publications would (or could) engender violence among inmates." Id.
We hold, as did the district court, that the practices of the appellants in denying to appellees their rights freely to exercise their religious beliefs during their incarceration and appellants' failure to apply a standard policy protective of appellees' religious freedoms are violative of their rights under the first amendment.
The district court having properly afforded the injunctive relief sought, we affirm and remand to the district court for the purpose of requiring appellants to submit a plan for censoring literature that does not violate the procedural protections afforded by the due process clause of the fourteenth amendment.
The district court's comprehensive recital of the facts in its findings is amply supported by the record, and we adopt the relevant portions here.
The parties to this class action have stipulated to the fact that the Hebrew Israelite faith is a bona fide religion. It has existed in splintered fashion since early in the twentieth century. The headquarters of the sect is the Temple of Love, located in Miami, Florida. It was founded in about 1981. From this location, Yahweh ben Yahweh, who was formerly known as Moses Israel, presides as the leader of the Hebrew Israelite faithful. Among the facilities housed within the Temple is a printing complex, through which the organization prints and distributes copies of books and religious tracts which set out the tenets and history of the sect.
The Hebrew Israelite faith, as developed in the literature distributed from the Temple of Love, is directed at black Americans, although there appears to be no explicit exclusion from membership of other races. The religion teaches that all blacks living in the United States are descendants of the "lost tribe of Israel", which, it is claimed, settled in biblical times on the west coast of Africa, only to be forcibly dispersed and removed to the Western Hemisphere by the slave trade of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Yahweh ben Yahweh, writing as Moses Israel, further instructs his followers that white society and white-dominated Jewish and Christian mainline churches have deliberately deceived American blacks since their introduction to this continent by concealing from them their true heritage as Black Hebrew Israelites. This historical/theological concept is supported in the literature by selective, and highly edited, quotations from the Hebrew Israelite Holy Bible.
By means of limited biblical quotations, often wholly rewritten, interspersed throughout the remainder of the Hebrew Israelite literature, Yahweh ben Yahweh teaches his followers that God is black, that Moses, Abraham, Jesus Christ, and all other important biblical figures were black, and that Yahweh ben Yahweh himself is the present incarnation of the god Yahweh. Among the practical tenets, or laws, of the faith are the belief that the Bible forbids a man to shave his beard, proscribes the use of illegal drugs and the practice of homosexuality, and requires adherence to dietary laws which forbid the eating of pork products. As do most religions, this one admonishes the faithful that prayer, study and adherence to the laws of the church are necessary to a proper life.
A central tenet of the subject religion, and one that is promoted in many of the Hebrew Israelite publications, is the belief that the "white man", in a collective sense, is the enemy of the black race, and that black people have been punished by God for their failure to adhere to the commands of Yahweh by being subjugated by oppressive white rule. Thus, a repeated message of these materials is that white society has continually mistreated black Americans since their arrival as slaves, and that the god Yahweh, through the messianic figure of Yahweh ben Yahweh, offers the faithful salvation at some future time by leading his followers back to their homeland, Israel.
The publications of the Temple of Love which have been refused admittance by chaplains or other officials at various facilities of the Florida Department of Corrections consist of the following items, all of which were introduced in evidence at the trial of this cause:
Plaintiffs' Exhibit # 4--The Holy Bible
This publication consists of a standard, edited King James Bible, to which six prefatory pages have been added, together with eighty-six titled illustrations. While most of these drawings serve to simply illustrate that various Biblical characters were black persons, several depict either acts of atrocity (e.g., an illustration of the mutilation and killing, by white men, of a pregnant black woman and her fetus entitled "Blacks Hate Whites Forever" included at page 120 of this 1,170-page text) or constitute disparagement of so-called "false religions" (at page 1068, a mocking caricature of the Roman Catholic Pope entitled "The First Beast.")
In this, the most polemical of the works which the appellants have excluded from the various prisons, author Moses Israel presents "the world's best kept secret" ' i.e., the lineage of black Americans as the lost tribe of Israel, as lessons to be presented to new and potential converts. The remainder of this book consists of a series of short tracts, mixing theological exhortations and slanted historical accounts of the black experience in this country, culminating in the message that the god Yahweh will return to liberate the Hebrew Israelite from domination by the "white devil."
This volume contains a collection of newspaper clippings of lynchings, mob attacks and other incidents of racial violence in turn-of-the-century America, letters from inmates in the Florida prison system complaining of their inability to practice the faith, and selected excerpts from "You Are Not A Nigger," Plaintiffs' Exhibit # 5.
In the only document not originally printed by the Temple of Love, the reader finds a roughly chronological compilation of newspaper clippings covering an eighty-year period (1870-1950) which describe various lunchings of black men and other racially motivated violence throughout the southern United States.
This pamphlet sets out a regimen of prescribed and proscribed foods for followers of the Hebrew Israelite religion, based loosely on the Jewish dietary laws set out in the books of Leviticus and Deuteronomy. The chief practical aspect of these laws for the plaintiff class is the avoidance of pork and pork products.
This five-page, mimeograph pamphlet is essentially a teachers' manual for followers who wish to instruct others by means of the Hebrew Israelite texts discussed above and contains a preliminary lesson in the Hebrew language. It should be noted that the author's introduction to this guide admonishes followers of Yahweh ben Yahweh who are inmates in state institutions to remain obedient to authorities while incarcerated.
The most recent of the Temple of Love publications is a purely prophetic vision of the redemption of the black race by Yahweh ben Yahweh at an unspecified future time.
This two-page form instructs the would-be convert in the proper method of registration for membership in the sect, and constitutes an application for an "Israelite name."
All of the above documents, except "Yahweh Judges America," which was released in 1985, have been sent (primarily by mail, though some copies were personally distributed by Temple elders) to one or more of the appellee class members. They were rejected by the appellants. 1
The worship services observed by the Hebrew Israelite inmates, when permitted, consist mainly of Bible study guided by the biblical interpretations set out in the Temple of Love literature. Associated with these services is the wearing, by participants, of a white turban and a Star of David, the latter being customarily worn by...
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