Last Thursday Poyner Spruill, a prominent North Carolina law firm, announced a victory in a pro bono case involving religious freedom of incarcerated Jehovah's Witnesses.
The Poyner team was appointed by the U.S. District Court for the Western District of North Carolina to represent an inmate challenging the State’s policy governing how and when Jehovah’s Witnesses can worship in prison. The State’s policy classified Jehovah’s Witnesses as a subset of Christian Protestants and, on that basis, prohibited separate Jehovah’s Witness meetings—an infringement on religious freedom under the First Amendment. After the Court denied the State’s motion for summary judgment, the State ultimately agreed to a consent decree that required changing its policy to allow for separate meetings for Jehovah’s Witnesses.
“We’re proud to have helped change an unconstitutional policy restricting religious freedom,” said Durnovich, who served as lead counsel on the case. “With this result, our client and Jehovah’s Witness inmates across the state will have the same right to practice their religion as other faith groups already enjoy.”
The consent decree in the case provides permanent injunctive relief requiring the State to recognize the Jehovah’s Witness faith as a distinct faith group, and to allow Jehovah’s Witness inmates the opportunity to schedule religious services like other recognized faith groups.
It took some time to find more information about that case, Brown v. Solomon; this order provides a summary of facts and arguments. Filed pro se five years ago, the case was settled this March, and the NC Department of Public Safety agreed "to revise its Religious Practices Manual and related policies and procedures to recognize the Jehovah’s Witness religion as a distinct non-Trinitarian faith group [and] to adopt the following description of the Jehovah’s Witness faith:"
Jehovah’s Witnesses believe that God is one person, Jehovah. Jesus was Jehovah’s first creation. Jesus is not God, nor part of the Godhead. He is higher than the angels but inferior to God. Jehovah used Jesus to create the rest of the universe. Before Jesus came to earth, he was known as the Word and the archangel Michael. The Holy Spirit is an impersonal force from Jehovah, but not God.
The plaintiff, Marshall Lee Brown, is relatively well-known, and his story was covered in two TV shows - Unsolved Mysteries and I (Almost) Got Away With It (the plot: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_(Almost)_Got_Away_With_It (season 1, episode 1-9)). In 1977, he, then 19, was sentenced to life imprisonment (effectively 80-year prison term) for a second-degree murder that, according to this article, was a contract killing for $50. He escaped from prison in April 1996, killed Steven Calhoun, a prosecution witness in the 1977 trial, and remained on the run until July 1999, when he was arrested in Washington, DC. In 2002, he was sentenced to a concurrent 20-23 years term. His release is scheduled for 2060.
It is unclear when Marshall Brown became a Witness. His mother (deceased in 2013) and sister (deceased in 2006) were members of the organization, but it’s still difficult to say if he was “raised in the truth.”