Judge finds prison officials conspired against Muslims
By Dana Gentry, Nevada Current
Staff at the Lovelock Correctional Center conspired to prevent Muslim inmates from praying at the religious faith’s prescribed times, according to U.S. District Judge Miranda Du, who presided over two cases filed by inmates at the Northern Nevada prison.
Said Elmajzoub, convicted of attempted sexual assault and sentenced to life without the possibility of parole, was deprived of his constitutional right to pray in accordance with Muslim practice and awarded $95,000 from the state in a settlement finalized this year.
In 2018, Elmajzoub asked Chaplain Scott Davis to “schedule time early Friday afternoons for Plaintiff and other Muslims to gather for Jumu’ah,” a Friday prayer session, according to the complaint he later filed.
The prison refused his request but offered other times, which are not in keeping with Muslim tradition.
“We just wanted any room, any hallway, any closet in the prison, for 20 or 30 minutes on a Friday afternoon so that we can pray, because it is a mandate for us – no different than Saturday is for Jews and Sunday is for Christians,” Elmajzoub said during an interview. “And the response I got back from the chaplain was, the only thing they could offer us was eight in the morning on Friday. Even though he knows it’s invalid, that’s what he was told to offer us.”
Department of Corrections caseworker Marc LaFleur asserted NDOC’s administrative regulations did not require the prayer to be held at a certain time, according to the complaint. Elmajzoub filed another grievance, noting the regulation did mention prescribed times for the prayer. Lovelock Warden Renee Baker responded by again offering the times Elmajzoub had earlier declined.
When he filed another grievance, NDOC Deputy Director of Programs Kim Thomas referred Elmajzoub to the options he’d already been offered.
“It started with just the Muslims, but the purpose was to get the chapel open to everyone to have a chance to pray,” Elmajzoub said. “I wanted everyone to have the most basic and minimum rights and the suit did that.”
The prison has a capacity of just under 1,700.
In a parallel case, Du granted summary judgment to five members of a prison prayer group called The Way Faith Group, which included a Muslim inmate. The state agreed to a $75,000 settlement to be shared by the plaintiffs.
“It was never about the money,” says Norman Shaw, who wrote the group’s complaint in 2018, but has since been released from prison. “We wanted our religious rights restored.”
Du, in an order granting summary judgment to Shaw and his fellow plaintiffs, wrote “…this is the rare case where Plaintiffs have direct evidence of a conspiracy to deprive them of their constitutional rights,” adding the evidence “is remarkable in the sense that it stands out in the Court’s experience presiding over hundreds of prisoner civil rights cases.”
Du referred to prison Chaplain Scott Davis’ “own notes taken after a meeting about the pertinent schedule change—produced by NDOC in discovery—that also implicates (Assistant Warden Tara) Carpenter.”
“‘Why did our Muslim studies get taken away,’” Davis wrote in his notes of the inmates’ inquiry. “I told them that I took that to AW Carpenter and she said ‘Denied.’ I couldn’t say in front of all of them that it was because they teach racism, hate and black supremacy. There would have been a riot.”
“It is hard for the Court to imagine a stronger piece of evidence in support of Plaintiffs’… conspiracy claim,” Du wrote in her order.
Elmajzoub says the state’s monetary wounds are “self-inflicted. They would have been able to avoid the entire thing if they would have just let us pray somewhere. But instead, they held to the position that they didn’t have to, which was negligent.”
Prison officials, he says, failed to consult with the Attorney General after eliminating the inmates’ ability to pray in accordance with their religion, and depositions indicate NDOC staff were not trained in the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUIPA), which prohibits laws “that substantially burden the religious exercise of churches or other religious assemblies” without employing the “least restrictive means of furthering a compelling governmental interest.”
“The actual litigation is rare in Nevada,” says Athar Haseebullah, executive director of the ACLU of Nevada. “The issue is not rare.”
Haseebullah says RLUIPA “at the federal level has been misapplied and watered down in certain settings when it applies to prisoners’ rights to maintain their faith. But it’s still a powerful tool. It’s just not used quite frequently enough, and there’s not that many entities or organizations that touch these types of cases.”
Elmajzoub, who wrote his own complaint, was ultimately represented by attorneys from the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR).
“It’s a very difficult thing to obtain a permanent injunction against the prison, as an inmate. Lawyers know that’s a very tall task,” he said. “And I think the amount of evidence I had, and CAIRS’ interest, was the strength of the case, because it didn’t require a lot of legal nuance or maneuvering. It was a black and white case.”
Elmajzoub says he wrestled with accepting the state’s settlement, in which NDOC admits to no wrongdoing and accepts no responsibility.
“That was the deal breaker for me. I lost sleep at night, and my lawyers told me I will never find a settlement where they admit wrongdoing,” he said. “I would have taken a little bit of money, like $20,000 or $25,000, but a settlement had to include that the service was going to be put on, and even after the suit was filed, they wouldn’t agree to it.”
When the judge ordered the state to comply, it failed to do so, prompting a contempt order from the court.
“The Court previously found Defendants in civil contempt for refusing to schedule Friday afternoon Jumu’ah, in violation of the permanent injunction,” Du wrote in late November 2022. “Yet Defendants continue to disobey the Court’s order by forcing Muslim inmates at Lovelock Correctional Center (‘LCC’) to pray on filthy floors in the prison cafeteria rather than the chapel, despite repeatedly representing to the Court that the chapel was open to Muslim inmates ‘anytime’ on Fridays and no other services were scheduled there.”
Elmajzoub’s attorney, Justin Sadowsky of CAIR, says the judge’s order applied only to his client’s security group at the Lovelock prison. “I don’t know if this is happening in other facilities in Nevada, but certainly in Lovelock, there are other Muslims who are in different security groupings, and we know that they have been complaining and reaching out, and I think they have very much the same legal rights as Said.”
Allen Lichtenstein, who assisted in Elmajzoub’s case, said while prisoner complaints are ubiquitous, cases that proceed to an injunction and settlement order “are not common. Most lawyers won’t take them. They’re not economically feasible.”
“Between qualified immunity and low jury awards, unfortunately, the damages for people in prison having their religious rights violated has not been as much of a sum of money as I believe those cases should be worth,” Sadowsky said. “I think $95,000 was a little less than our attorney’s fee demand.”
“The main thing wasn’t the money for him,” Lichtenstein says of his client. “He just wanted a situation where Muslim prisoners would have access to a place where they could hold their Friday service.”
‘Bottomless pit’
Elmajzoub told the Current his case “could’ve been resolved in five minutes by rearranging the chapel schedule, and for zero dollars. Instead they paid me and my lawyers $95k and hired an outside lawyer to defend the government.”
Elmajzoub wrote that NDOC “seems all too glad to dip into a bottomless pit of money to settle civil suits. The issues can almost always be resolved for near nothing at the onset.”
NDOC was unable to provide a list of recent settlements and judgments by publication.
Shaw says his case and Elmajzoub’s “played off of each other. But Elmajzoub had attorneys,” says Shaw, who worked as a paralegal and law clerk before going to prison, and “did the legal work” on behalf of his co-plaintiffs. He says he’s unaware of any discipline imposed by the state against the defendants.
“They don’t discipline anyone,” he said. “They just thumb their nose.”
NDOC did not respond to a request for comment on the fate of the prison officials who conspired against the inmates. The department also did not say whether it has provided training for prison personnel on laws prohibiting religious discrimination.
Elmajzoub, who was convicted of battery with intent to commit sexual assault resulting in substantial bodily harm, a crime he maintains he did not commit, says he intends to use part of the settlement to hire a lawyer to appeal his sentence of life without parole.
He has been in custody for 16 years.
“I don’t have a loss of life in my case. No one died, no one was raped, and I’ve never been in trouble before,” he says. “And I got sentenced to life without parole. I’ve seen people come into prison and leave with murder cases and reoffend, and I’m still here on a case where a girl got beat up.”
Another chunk of the settlement went to his mother.
“We didn’t have any money growing up. The settlement was a lot of money, and my mom still works at 70-some years old,” he said. “It felt good to be able to do something.”
Shaw notes he and the others didn’t ask for money, but just to have chapel service restored.
“How many pencils, books, and teacher salaries could have been augmented by the state for our children?” he asks rhetorically. “Prison staff can trample over a person’s constitutional rights without any repercussions and the state uses its open bank book to solve the problems. The real victims of the prison system are the people of the State of Nevada.”
