What happened
The Fourth Circuit revived a Virginia prisoner's First Amendment Free Exercise damages claim Tuesday, ruling that a district court failed to decide whether prison officials had a legitimate penological basis for refusing to provide meals that satisfied both Ramadan fasting and Orthodox Jewish kosher-supervision requirements.
Stephen Roberts, a Sunni Muslim incarcerated at Red Onion State Prison, said his faith required him to fast during Ramadan and to eat only food prepared under Kashrut requirements with Orthodox rabbinical supervision. Judge James A. Wynn Jr., writing for Judges Robert B. King and Stephanie D. Thacker, opened the published opinion by noting that a prisoner asserting religious-liberty claims has both constitutional and statutory tools, but that the “RLUIPA arrow flies farther and strikes harder.”
Roberts had been approved for Virginia's Orthodox Jewish Kosher Diet in 2019. When Ramadan approached in 2020, prison officials told him they could not also accommodate the fasting schedule in time and offered him a choice: remain on the kosher diet without fasting, or switch to the Common Fare diet to observe Ramadan, with a six-month bar on returning to the kosher diet. Roberts instead saved his kosher meals until sunset, and the opinion says he became ill and was treated for food poisoning three times.
The court affirmed much of the lower-court ruling. It upheld the denial of Roberts' motion to compel discovery about VDOC Common Fare diet history, agreed that claims for injunctive and declaratory relief were moot after VDOC created a Ramadan-compliant kosher diet in 2021, and affirmed summary judgment on the Establishment Clause and Equal Protection claims.
But the panel said the Free Exercise analysis was incomplete. Because the district court did not fully evaluate the Turner factors, the Fourth Circuit remanded for the court to determine whether the prison's refusal to accommodate Roberts' 2020 request was reasonably related to legitimate penological interests.
The ruling leaves a narrow path forward. Roberts does not get judgment on liability, and most of his case remains dismissed. On remand, his only surviving claim is for damages against the defendants in their individual capacities, with the district court tasked with testing the prison's asserted safety, timing and administrative justifications against the constitutional standard.