A city judge in Georgia has in the past eight days barred two Muslim women wearing Islamic headscarves from entering his courtroom, jailing one, and prompting an inquiry from the civil rights office at the US department of justice.
Judge Keith Rollins of Douglasville, Georgia, yesterday ordered Lisa Valentine, 41, to jail after she refused to remove her scarf before entering the courtroom, citing rules governing appropriate dress. Last week, Sabreen Abdulrahmaan was forced to leave Rollins’s court before her son’s probation hearing because she would not remove her scarf.
“It’s a religious right,” Valentine said. “It’s our constitutional right that we can have our religious practices, no matter if it’s a courtroom or not. He’s supposed to be handing out justice, not taking away civil rights.”
Valentine said she sought to accompany her nephew to a traffic hearing yesterday but was told by a court security officer that she could not enter the courtroom with her headscarf on. She said she refused to remove it and turned to leave, saying, “This is bullshit”.
Security officers handcuffed her and brought her before Rollins, who sentenced her to 10 days in jail when she declined to defend her actions at the security checkpoint, her husband Omar Hall said. Valentine, an insurance underwriter, was forced to take off the scarf and don an orange jumpsuit, chained and put aboard a jail bus with men and women.
“It felt like I was naked, because that’s how I feel without my hijab,” Valentine said. “You could have taken off my clothes and it would have felt the same way.”
Her husband phoned an Islamic civil rights organisation and sought an attorney, and she was released without explanation after about seven hours.
“Judge Keith Rollins has inexplicably, blatantly usurped our innate human rights as American citizens,” Hall said
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