The hard line confederacy (Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, South Carolina,
Texas, Virginia) attack on prisoner’s religious rights to hair and
beards while incarcerated has led to a blatant case of perjury in the
State of Arkansas, in an attempt to justify this religious repression.
In an effort to deny a prisoner his right to a beard as a Muslim,
magistrate Judge Joe J. Volpe, U.S. District Court, ruled that while a
prisoner has a right to his religious practices under the Religious Land
Use/Institutionalized Person Act (R.L.U.I.P.A., 42 U.S. Code § 2000cc)
the prison could overwhelm his constitutional rights if there was a
credible, reasonable ‘security penological necessity’ to trample those
rights.
In quick order, the District Judge rubber stamped this, once Ray Hobbs,
the director of the State of Arkansas Department of Prisons, stated in a
sworn deposition that he personally was aware of one single example of
one type of dangerous contraband being smuggled, concealed in a
prisoner’s beard. (A long laundry list of horrors, which the state
claimed ‘may’ be hidden in a quarter inch beard but not, presumably,
elsewhere on the body, included cell phone SIM cards, knives, drugs, and
homemade darts).
The U.S. Supreme Court will now take up this case. Last term, this court
ruled (by the five right wingers) that corporations have religious
rights that trump women’s civil rights. (“Hobby lobby” case). Now, the
same lawyers who argued for the corporation in that case, to create
civil rights for non-living corporations, will press the prison’s case
to deny religious rights. The lawyers are specially appointed by the
court that will hear the case. No one dares complain, after all, since
to do so would be to attack the judges you hope will rule in your favor,
as “biased.”
In a bizarre twist discovered after the lower courts ruled based upon
the sole example of a dangerous, and in this example deadly, razor blade
smuggled in a prisoner’s beard, perjury most foul was exposed. And it
was dripping off the lips of none other than director Roy Hobbs, top
good ol’ boy in the Arkansas department of corruption.
Roy Hobbs swore that a prisoner named Steven Oldham smuggled a razor
blade within his beard, and when the opportunity arose, he proceeded to
commit suicide with that very razor blade. My goodness. How simply
awful, and of course, how clear it is that beards are a deadly threat to
security.
The magistrate, district and circuit judges all agreed.
Let’s peek behind the perjury veil.
As was well known to Roy Hobbs, prior to and during his part in the
conspiracy to defraud the courts, the razor that dealt the lethal wound
was a bright orange plastic single blade item purchased by Arkansas
Dept. of Corruption. This molded plastic unit with a steel blade encased
within it was not ever suspected of being smuggled, hidden, or illicitly
possessed. It was handed to the prisoner by prison staff, with orders to
shave off his beard.
The lying director, desperate to manufacture even one tiny example of
any kind of ‘beard smuggling’ to justify his blatantly racist attack on
the religious rights of persons who, in the southern states, face a lot
of this special treatment in prisons, had knowingly concocted this
‘boogie man’. It worked. Only if the razor had been used against a guard
would the fantasy incident have carried more weight with the tsk tsking
judges all the way to the country’s supreme court.
Roy Hobbs did the usual finger-pointing maneuver when caught red handed
committing perjury, he blames everyone in the world for misleading him
into stating he knows for a fact that which any cursory investigation
reveals as false. In California, where I reside on death row, penal code
§125 declares that when a person states under oath that which he does
not know to be a fact, that is identical to knowingly lying. Even if the
‘fact’ happens to be true. That means, in this state at least, Roy Hobbs
was guilty of perjury for stating as fact this ‘razorblade in the beard’
lie, even had it been true. Which of course, it was obviously not.
The country’s highest court is now reviewing whether the ‘security
claim’ by the prison director is sufficient to overcome a prisoner’s
religious rights. Even when the single faked security claim was
blazingly criminal perjury. This should be an opportunity for the high
court to write the rules about what level of proof of flat out
corruption prisoners may use to destroy the court’s own rule about how
prison officials get deference when they shriek “security!”
Let’s see what pretzeled logic and tortured theories the rat pack at the
supreme court come out with. The only evidence of any security risk was
conspired criminal perjury. Roy Hobbs keeps directing Arkansas’ prisons,
rather than occupying a cell in a federal penitentiary.
MIM(Prisons) adds: The entire criminal injustice system, from
police to prisons, is set up to serve the interests of the imperialists
running the government. So it’s no surprise that false evidence is
sufficient to deny prisoner’s rights. This case is unique in that the
perjury was actually exposed. Unfortunately, the courts don’t serve up
justice, and so we can expect little from them in defending the rights
of the oppressed. The imperialist courts will never lead to liberation
for the oppressed. We must continue to expose these cases to educate
people about the systematic nature of injustice as we build an
anti-imperialist movement that can overthrow the system that relies on
injustice for its very survival.
