Late last year, the Supreme Court seemingly gave the cause of religious liberty a victory by reviving the case of 4 former Guantanamo detainees. They ordered the DC Appeals Court to reconsider their dismissal of their suit in light of the more recent ruling in Boumediene, affirming that such detainees do have some constitutional rights.
In a ruling Friday, however, the Court of Appeals determined (pdf) that Boumediene does not impact their calculation, and reiterated their earlier judgment that for purposes of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, Guantanamo detainees do not qualify as "persons". (SCOTUSBlog's Lyle Denniston reports on the impact of this ruling here. An AP report is here.)The Baptist Joint Committee urged against this limitation in an amicus brief, arguing that "RFRA makes no distinctions between the rights of citizens and the rights of aliens."
Notably in this new rejection of claims, Judge Janice Rogers Brown dissented, not from the ultimate outcome (dismissal) but from the "personhood" argument, echoing many of the concerns the BJC and other religious groups articulated in their brief. Important quotes from her opinion are below .
RFRA does not define “person,” so we must look to the word’s ordinary meaning. There is little mystery that a “person” is “an individual human being . . . as distinguished from an animal or a thing.” Unlike the majority, I believe Congress “[did not] specifically intend[] to vest the term ‘persons’ with a definition . . . at odds with its plain meaning.”
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The majority does not point to a single statute defining “person” so narrowly as to exclude nonresident aliens from its ambit, and nothing in RFRA’s history suggests Congress focused on the term’s scope here.
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RFRA implements the Free Exercise Clause. The term “person” does not appear in the Free Exercise Clause, and thus the definition of “person” cannot be the reason aliens held abroad do not have free exercise rights.
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While “the people” are merely a “class of persons,” the relevant inquiry for RFRA purposes is “who are‘persons’?” The answer is obvious—“persons” are individual human beings, of whom the American people are just one class.
