PHILADELPHIA – The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit has reinstated a religious discrimination lawsuit brought by a former prosecutor, concerning a COVID-19 vaccine mandate at the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office.
In a ruling reached July 29, the federal appellate bench found District Attorney Larry Krasner and the City of Philadelphia may have infringed upon the religious liberty of plaintiff Rachel Spivack, a member of the Orthodox Jewish faith, when it didn’t extend an exemption from the vaccination mandate to her.
Third Circuit judges Cheryl Ann Krause, Arianna J. Freeman and Tamika R. Montgomery-Reeves considered the case, with Freeman authoring the Court’s opinion.
The members of the Third Circuit found a lower federal court erred when it granted the City and Krasner’s prior motion for summary judgment and “overlooked factual disputes that a jury must resolve," and remanded the case to the trial court.
Just before Spivack started working for the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office in 2021, a mandate was implemented which required all of its workers to be vaccinated against COVID-19. When she submitted an exemption request citing her Orthodox Jewish faith as the reason she couldn’t be vaccinated, her request was denied.
Her refusal to take the vaccine ultimately cost her the job at the District Attorney’s Office, and she later filed suit in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania against the City and Krasner in 2022, arguing that the vaccine mandate violated the First Amendment’s Free Exercise Clause and the Pennsylvania Religious Freedom Protection Act.
However, the District Court found the vaccine mandate policy was “neutral and generally applicable, and therefore subject to rational basis review.”
“Applying that standard, the District Court held that the mandate was constitutional because it was rationally related to the DAO’s interests in curtailing the spread of COVID-19, avoiding staffing shortages, and reducing the risk of death and serious illness among DAO staff and the public,” Freeman said.
The City and Krasner then moved for summary judgment and were granted it, dismissing the case – leading Spivack to appeal to the Third Circuit.
In its analysis, the Third Circuit pointed two disputes of fact that necessitated the remanding of the case to the lower court, for a jury to decide.
The first being that the initial version of the District Attorney’s Office’s vaccine mandate policy allowed for religious exemptions on an individual, case-by-case basis, whereas a revised version of the policy permitted no such exemptions. At this time, it is not understood which version the District Attorney’s Office pointed to when it denied Spivack her exemption.
Freeman and her colleagues also pointed to a remark Krasner made during his deposition, as potential evidence of anti-religious sentiment on the part of the District Attorney’s Office.
“Because it presents yet another public safety health obstacle in the middle of an international pandemic within the walls of my office[, and] because it increases the urgency of as many other people in the office as possible being fully vaccinated. I don’t agree with it. I think that it is very unfortunate that nationally, I’m not, I don’t want to throw any rocks at the City for this, they are dealing with a lot, but it is true across the country that there are some people who are just flat-out unscientific and there are some people who are not as concerned as they really should be for their fellow human beings and, so, we find ourselves in a situation where we have, basically, people who are denying science and are endangering others and it’s wrong,” Krasner said, in regards to the vaccine mandate policy.
“One of the things you may not know from my career is that I have sat in courtrooms where parents refused to provide medical care for their children and whose children then died, [and they] have been convicted of crimes and sent to jail for that, and the law thinks that that’s right and the law thinks that that’s correct. Their basis for denying medical care[,] in some instances to more than one child after another who died, one child after another, was their religious beliefs. Rights are not completely unlimited. They can’t be completely unlimited and those children lost their lives because their parents were utterly unscientific in what they were doing. Government has a role and that role is to respect, observe[,] and elevate rights, but it is not to do so in a way that annihilates the population and kills people.”
Freeman said the question of these remarks from Krasner and their intent deserve higher scrutiny, because he was responsible for installing the vaccine mandate.
“A jury must decide whether similar problems plague Krasner’s comments. They could be read to reflect a belief that those seeking a religious exemption are ‘unscientific’ and selfish ‘not as concerned as they really should be for their fellow human beings’) such that he needed to curtail religious exemptions to prevent religious objectors from ‘endangering others.’ A reasonable jury could interpret these comments to evince hostility toward religious viewpoints that influenced the DAO’s treatment of religious exemptions,” Freeman stated.
At the same time, Krasner testified “that he respected Spivack’s beliefs and those of other religiously observant people…and he claimed that his decision to disallow religious exemptions in the January 2022 policy was rooted in respect for religion, because he ‘did not want to be in a position of judging what people’s beliefs are sincere and what people’s beliefs are not sincere.”
The matter now heads back to the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, for consideration by a jury.
U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit case 23-1212
U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania case 2:22-cv-01438
From the Pennsylvania Record: Reach Courts Reporter Nicholas Malfitano at nick.malfitano@therecordinc.com