Abstract
For the past fifteen years, the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) has been litigating claims brought against it by incarcerated Muslims seeking the ability to pray with other Muslims in a group in accordance with their sincerely held religious beliefs. The vast majority of this litigation occurred after the Southern District of Indiana enjoined BOP officials from enforcing a prohibition on group prayer in 2013. Despite this injunction, the BOP failed to implement a policy that expressly allowed for group prayer in all of its 122 institutions nationwide, which led to further litigation in at least seven federal district courts, three federal appellate courts, and one petition to the United States Supreme Court.
This Article excavates this litigation history and demonstrates how the BOP used procedural gamesmanship and its transfer power to avoid merits adjudication in two-thirds of the group prayer cases identified. By detailing this group of cases, the Article seeks to illuminate how the BOP wastes judicial and governmental resources and flagrantly disregards the authority of the federal courts by deploying strategic maneuvers to avoid judicial decision making. The Article calls on the federal courts to stop countenancing this behavior and embrace its role as a force of accountability for this powerful executive agency.
Recommended Citation
Nicole B. Godfrey,
Group Prayer in Federal Prison,
103 Neb. L. Rev. 19
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Available at: https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/nlr/vol103/iss1/3