Judge LeShonda Hunt, nominated by President Biden to the federal district court for the Northern District of Illinois, invalidated policies severely limiting the access of pre-trial detainees to mail and information. The July 2024 decision was in Walsh v Kelley.
What is the background of this case?
The Will County Adult Detention Facility in Illinois primarily includes individuals who are being detained before trial without a conviction. A number of individuals who had been detained without trial for more than a year filed a lawsuit against the Facility, challenging several policies that severely restricted the information and mail they could receive. The court certified the case as a class action.
The challenged policies included a ban on any material printed from the internet, media articles, or pages taken from books or magazines (the “media policy”) as well as a ban on any mail with a return address of a P.O.Box, regardless of who it came from (the “P.O. Box policy”). They also challenged a policy banning “sexual or inappropriate content” as determined by the mailroom. Following discovery, both the individuals and the Facility filed motions for summary judgment.
How did Judge Hunt Rule and Why is it Important?
Judge Hunt wrote a 25 page opinion that upheld the policy concerning sexual content, but struck down as unconstitutional and illegal both the media policy and the P.O. box policy. She ruled that both policies violated the First Amendment, and that the P.O. box policy also violated the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUIPA) as applied to mail to or form religious organizations. (RLUIPA is a federal civil rights law that protects those who want to use property for religious purposes and institutionalized persons from substantial and unjustified burdens on their religious free exercise).
In evaluating the restrictive rules under the First Amendment, Judge Hunt utilized the test developed by the Supreme Court for prisons and similar institutions in Turner v Saffley. She found ‘unrebutted evidence” in the record that the policy on sexual content was tied to the legitimate goal of promoting security and therefore upheld it. In contrast, shefound that the P.O. box policy was not rationally connected to the security goal of limiting mail from unidentified senders, since it has denied people mail from “known senders, including religious organizations” and “prisoner advocacy and resource groups” that did not pose “a single security concern.” Judge Hunt accordingly granted summary judgment and struck down the P.O. box policy under the First Amendment.
She similarly invalidated the media policy. Although she recognized that the policy could conceivably be related to security concerns, Judge Hunt concluded that it “falls short” on the remaining factors under Turner and is therefore unconstitutional. For example, she found that the institution’s interests can be “accommodated” by alternatives such as mail screening, which occurs anyway, that will not cause such harms as denying one individual “a printout of get-well messages” that “friends posted on Facebook.”
Judge Hunt also granted summary judgment against the facility on the P.O. box policy as applied to mail to and from religious organizations under RLUIPA. She noted that where it applies, RLUIPA “provides greater protection than the First Amendment.” She determined that the policy clearly imposed a “substantial burden” on the religious exercise of people who wanted to receive materials from and sent letters to religious groups that use P.O. boxes. The record also showed, she wrote, that the facility had failed to meet its burden of “proving a compelling government interest” for the policy and that the policy was the “least restrictive means” to promote its interests.
Judge Hunt’s decision is obviously important to the people in the Will County facility who seek to vindicate their rights to mail and other communications under the First Amendment and RLUIPA. It also provides a good example of how to apply these principles that can be very useful to other courts in similar situations, And the ruling serves as an illustration of the importance of promptly confirming fair-minded judges to our federal courts.