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Message: <br /><br /> If you are having trouble reading this email, you may view this article online at: http://www.jweekly.com/21337/full/21337/orthodox-inmate-fights-the-law-to-keep-kosher-and-wins/ <br /><br /> <b>Orthodox inmate fights the law to keep kosher — and wins</b> <br /> Friday, December 19, 2003 | by <p>joe eskenazi </p> <br /><br /><p>The state for years willfully ignored its obligation to provide kosher meals for Orthodox inmates, according to the lawyers of a Jewish prisoner who this week won that right via a legal settlement. <br /><br /> The California Department of Corrections agreed Wednesday, Dec. 10, to provide kosher meals to Victor Wayne Cooper and his fellow inmates at Solano State Prison. The settlement further stipulates that the state must make “good faith efforts” to provide kosher programs in all state prisons by 2006. <br /><br /> The state was eager to settle the case because, in refusing to provide Cooper with meals, “they knew they were breaking the law,” said Cooper’s co-counsel, Shinyung Oh. <br /><br /> A 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruling in 1997 ordered the state of Arizona to provide kosher meals to a Jewish inmate and should have pertained to California as well. <br /><br /> “The problem was, the law has been very firmly established since 1997, and the California Department of Corrections has been ignoring it all these years. The 9th Circuit [ruling] should apply to all the states in the circuit. They’ve just been ignoring all this time,” Oh said. <br /><br /> Before suing the state, Cooper, a convicted child molester decades into a 60-year sentence, spent years exhausting the prison’s administrative remedies in his quest for kosher food. At one point, he even went on a hunger strike.<br /><br /> “Every step of the way, he was denied. It was an extra expense,” Oh continued. “They claimed it was too expensive.”<br /><br /> Greg Fayard, a deputy state attorney general, strongly denied that the state was knowingly violating a 9th Circuit ruling. Instead, he argued, the Department of Corrections’ food administrators “were not aware of the 1997 decision until it came up in this lawsuit.” Instead, they adhered to an earlier state law declaring that a special meal for observant prisoners cannot cost more than a regular meal.<br /><br /> The food administrators “are not attorneys, and it’s not their job to do research on religious liberty,” he said. “They didn’t know.” <br /><br /> Cooper’s co-counsel, Heather Nolan, said a prepackaged kosher meal would cost around $2, $1 more than a regular meal. <br /><br /> Fayard said he wasn’t yet sure what a “good faith effort” to create a statewide kosher program within two years would entail, but said a task force is being “assembled to formulate some sort of plan.”  </p> <p> </p>

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