WASHINGTON — When the Supreme Court comes back from its summer break next month, it will pick up where it left off, returning to the subject of religious freedom. But the court’s focus will shift from corporations to prisoners.
On the final day of the last term, in June, the justices ruled in the Hobby Lobby case that some corporations could refuse to provide contraception coverage to their workers on religious grounds.
The new case, to be argued on Oct. 7, the second day of the next term, concerns whether prison officials may prohibit Muslim inmates from growing the beards required by their faiths.
The juxtaposition of the two cases may color the justices’ analysis in the second one, said Marci A. Hamilton, a law professor at Cardozo Law School.
“After going out on a limb by providing newfound rights to corporations,” she said, “are they now going to turn around and say that prisoners can’t grow beards?”
The justices will apply a familiar legal test to decide the case. As in the Hobby Lobby case, they will consider whether the challenged government regulation placed a substantial burden on religious practices. If it did, the government must show that it had a compelling reason for the regulation and no better way to achieve it.
The new case was brought by an Arkansas inmate, Gregory H. Holt, who is serving a life sentence for burglary and domestic battery. Mr. Holt, also known as Abdul Maalik Muhammad, sought to grow a half-inch beard.
More than 40 state prison systems allow such beards, which are shorter than a dime. Most allow longer ones. The exceptions, according to Mr. Holt’s brief, are Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, Texas and Virginia.
In Arkansas, prison regulations allow “neatly trimmed” mustaches, along with quarter-inch beards for inmates with dermatologic problems. Other kinds of beards are banned.
At a 2012 hearing in Mr. Holt’s case, prison officials testified that the strict policy was a result of security concerns.
Even short beards, one said, could conceal “anything from razor blades to drugs to homemade darts.” Another said that SIM cards for cellphones could also be hidden in beards.
The two officials conceded, however, that there are many other places to hide contraband, including clothes, shoes and body cavities.
Magistrate Judge Joe J. Volpe of the Federal District Court in Little Rock said he saw little reason to make Mr. Holt shave the short beard he wore in court.
“It’s almost preposterous to think that you could hide contraband in your beard,” Judge Volpe said. “But there’s a bigger picture here.”
Judge Volpe ruled against Mr. Holt, saying that prison officials’ security assessments deserved deference. A district judge and an appeals court agreed.
In their Supreme Court brief, Arkansas officials listed other kinds of contraband that might be hidden in beards: needles, pieces of wire, broken glass, gum, caulk, tobacco, marijuana and powdered drugs. The officials told the justices that they should not be required to produce evidence that prisoners actually used beards as hiding places.
“Courts should not insist on studies, data or concrete examples,” the brief said. Prisons are dangerous places, it said, and the judgments of those in charge are entitled to deference.
The state’s brief did provide one example, based on testimony last year from Ray Hobbs, the director of the state’s corrections department and the lead defendant in Mr. Holt’s lawsuit. The testimony came in a hearing concerning a different prisoner who sought to grow a beard for religious reasons.
Asked whether he knew of prisoners who “got caught concealing contraband within their beards,” Mr. Hobbs described an incident the month before. “An inmate fresh out of county jail,” he said, “concealed a part of a razor blade and later on that night committed suicide with it.”
The state’s Supreme Court brief, filed in July, cited that testimony. But it was only partly true.
An inmate named Steven Oldham did kill himself with a razor on Aug. 8, 2013, in Malvern, Ark. But he did so, according to a sworn statement from the coroner, by using “an orange plastic disposable razor” that had been issued to him by prison authorities so he could shave his beard.
Douglas Laycock, one of Mr. Holt’s lawyers, said Supreme Court briefs should meet a higher standard of factual accuracy. “This kind of flat misrepresentation to the court, however it happened,” he said, “doesn’t happen very often.”
A reply brief from Mr. Holt pointed out the error, and lawyers from the state attorney general’s office promptly wrote a letter to the court disavowing their earlier account of the incident. “The testimony of Director Hobbs” concerning Mr. Oldham, they wrote to the Supreme Court, “was erroneous in stating that the razor was concealed in a beard.”
Through a spokesman, Mr. Hobbs said he “does not wish to offer comments” about how he came to give false testimony. A spokesman for the state attorney general’s office, which represents Mr. Hobbs in the Supreme Court, declined to elaborate on the office’s letter to the justices.
Mr. Laycock said the disavowal in the letter was significant. “This was their only example,” he said.
Professor Hamilton of Cardozo Law School said there were authentic security concerns in play in the case. “There has to be a real thumb on the side of deference to the prison,” she said, particularly because “prisoners have no shame in claiming to be members of any religion.”
“There is a real risk,” she added, “that prisons face with facial hair.”
The state told the justices that it had other concerns beyond the smuggling of contraband. Merely having to inspect beards, the state’s brief said, may be dangerous. “Razor blades, dirty needles or other items could cut correctional officers,” the brief said.
Mr. Holt responded that prisoners could be made to run their hands vigorously through their own beards.
The state added that allowing beards would make it easy for escaped prisoners to alter their appearance. Mr. Holt responded that the prison authorities could take pictures of inmates with and without beards.
Last year, the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, in St. Louis, ruled that the state’s justifications were sufficient to prohibit Mr. Holt from growing a beard. Mr. Holt then filed a handwritten petition asking the justices to hear his case, Holt v. Hobbs, No. 13-6827, pointing out that other courts had struck down policies banning beards in prisons.
In an interim order in November, the Supreme Court said Mr. Holt must for now be allowed to grow a half-inch beard.
In addition to Mr. Laycock, who teaches law at the University of Virginia, Mr. Holt is represented by the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, which also represented Hobby Lobby, the chain of crafts stores that won last term’s religious liberty case.
The two cases are quite different, said Ira C. Lupu, a law professor at George Washington University, as “prisons are highly specialized contexts.”
“This case coming the term after Hobby Lobby,” he said, “is the purest coincidence.”