[NYTr] Yet Another Fed Court Rules Against Coerced Religious Addiction "Treatment"

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

[The 9th Circuit includes 9 states.  This is the 4th or 5th major
Federal-level court ruling against court-coerced addiction "treatment"
in a religious program. Including state courts, there have been 8 or 9
challenges to court-mandated attendance at religion-based meetings. 
Despite claiming to be "spiritual but not religious" 12-step treatment
programs have uniformly been found to be religious in all the cases. No
case has gone to the Supreme Court, because the plaintiffs challenging
court coercion have always won at the Federal or Appeals-Court level,
and the local governments or courts who lost have never pursued the
cases to ask for Supreme Court review. -NYTr]


San Francisco Chronicle - Sep 8, 2007
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/09/08/BA99S1AKQ.DTL

Appeals court says requirement to attend AA unconstitutional

by Bob Egelko
Chronicle Staff Writer

Alcoholics Anonymous, the renowned 12-step program that directs problem
drinkers to seek help from a higher power, says it's not a religion and
is open to nonbelievers. But it has enough religious overtones that a
parolee can't be ordered to attend its meetings as a condition of
staying out of prison, a federal appeals court ruled Friday.

In fact, said the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco,
the constitutional dividing line between church and state in such cases
is so clear that a parole officer can be sued for damages for ordering
a parolee to go through rehabilitation at Alcoholics Anonymous or an
affiliated program for drug addicts.

Rulings from across the nation since 1996 have established that
"requiring a parolee to attend religion-based treatment programs
violates the First Amendment," the court said. "While we in no way
denigrate the fine work of (Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics
Anonymous), attendance in their programs may not be coerced by the
state."

The 12 steps required for participants in both programs include an
acknowledgment that "a power greater than ourselves could restore us to
sanity" and a promise to "turn our will and our lives over to the care
of God as we understood Him." They also call for prayer and meditation.

Friday's 3-0 ruling allows a Honolulu man to go to trial in a suit on
behalf of his late father, Ricky Inouye, who was paroled from a drug
sentence in November 2000.

A Buddhist, he objected to religiously oriented drug treatment in
prison, sued state officials over the issue and told Hawaii parole
authorities just before his release that he would object to any
condition that included a treatment program with religious content.

When Inouye was arrested for trespassing in March 2001 and tested
positive for drugs, his parole officer, Mark Nanamori, ordered him to
attend a Salvation Army treatment program that included participation
in Narcotics Anonymous meetings, the court said.

Inouye showed up but refused to participate, dropped out after two
months, and, for that and other reasons, was sent back to prison in
November 2001 for violating his parole.

After his release in 2003, he sued Nanamori and others for violating
his constitutional rights. Inouye died while the suit was pending, and
his son took over the case.

A federal judge dismissed the suit, saying officers are required to pay
damages for violating constitutional rights only when those rights are
already clearly established.

But the appeals court said Nanamori should have known in 2001 that
coerced participation in a religion-based program was unconstitutional
because eight state and federal courts had ruled on the issue by then
and all had agreed that a parolee has a right to be assigned to a
secular treatment program.