California Prisoner Wins Round Before Magistrate in Lawsuit Over Marriage Application Delayed Two Years
It took California state prisoner Rafael Salas almost two years before he was able to marry in May 2022, due to repeated delays by state Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) officials at Kern Valley State Prison. He filed suit pro se in federal court for the Eastern District of California, raising claims under the First and Fourteenth Amendments, as well as the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUIPA), 42 U.S.C. § 2000cc et seq. On September 26, 2023, a magistrate recommended that Defendant CDCR officials be denied summary judgment on Salas’ civil rights claims, though granted on his RLUIPA claim.
Salas believed he was required to marry as part of his Messianic Jewish faith, and he began that process in early 2020, requesting to wed fiancée Heather Tower. It took four months and a grievance just to obtain marriage application forms, then another three months plus another grievance before a deputy warden ordered the application to be reviewed.
During that review, Counselor Y. Cortez placed the request on hold because Salas’ prison records (C-File) indicated that he was already married to someone else. Salas clarified that he had never been married and that Cortez was relying on incorrect information. Despite repeatedly filing grievances and contacting other prison officials, including Kern Valley Warden Christian Pfeiffer and Cortez’s supervisor, Counselor D. Thomas, Salas was unable to resolve the issue.
Instead he was told to obtain a “verified document” from a court or Hall of Records to show that he was never married. But officials at the latter assured his fiancée that no such document exists. Nevertheless, delays persisted until November 2020 when, during a meeting with Cortez, she agreed to help Salas marry. But Cortez immediately retracted her offer, according to Salas, because his fiancée was white.
Salas and Tower were eventually wed, but Defendants vigorously defended their delay of the marriage application. They argued that under the four-prong standard established in Turner v. Safley, 482 U.S. 78 (1987)—also a case involving a prisoner’s right to marry—they had not improperly burdened Salas’ marriage request. Specifically, Defendants pointed to Salas’ C-File that indicated (incorrectly) he was already married, saying that preventing prisoners from committing bigamy was a “legitimate penological interest,” to borrow the phrase from Turner describing what permits violation of a prisoner’s civil rights.
In the magistrate’s Report and Recommendation (R&R), the judge noted that Salas was not challenging the prison’s marriage policy but rather “whether Defendants acted properly in enforcing this regulation as to him.” It was undisputed that there were lengthy delays in processing Salas’ application, prompting him to submit numerous requests and grievances. Nor was there a dispute that prison officials sent him on a wild goose chase for documentation that didn’t exist. So the magistrate found there was a genuine factual dispute whether the prison’s marriage policy, as applied to Salas, “was justified and reasonably related to legitimate penological interests.”
The remaining Turner factors—including the absence of alternative means of exercising the right to marry and the devastating impact of failure to accommodate the right—also weighed more heavily in Salas’ favor than the deference generally owed to prison officials. Additionally, the magistrate reported, Salas had stated valid claims against Thomas and Warden Pfeiffer, since both were aware of the delays in processing his marriage request but took no corrective action. Nor had Salas failed to exhaust his administrative remedies, alleging in his grievances that Cortez refused to help him “because his fiancée was white.” The magistrate thus held that Salas had “sufficiently alerted the prison to the problem” of “having his marriage application approved,” which was enough for exhaustion purposes.
Defendants argued that they were entitled to qualified immunity. But the magistrate noted that Turner clearly established a prisoner’s right to marry subject to reasonable regulations. The issue was not whether Defendants had legitimate reasons for delaying the request but whether such delay was due to “illegitimate reasons including that [Salas] lacked a document that did not exist and because [his] fiancée was white.”
However, given that Salas was eventually allowed to wed, his request for injunctive relief was deemed moot, along with his RLUIPA claim. Accordingly, the magistrate recommended denying Defendants summary judgment only as to Salas’ First and Fourteenth Amendment claims, while granting it regarding his RLUIPA claim and request for injunctive relief. See: Salas v. Pfeiffer, 2023 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 171623 (E.D. Cal.).
Before the Court could act on the R&R, presiding Judge Ana I. de Alba was elevated to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. The case was delayed six months before it was reassigned to Judge Kirk E. Sherriff in March 2024. No action was taken after that, though—in fact all docket activity ceased in July 2024. But the case remains open, and PLN will update developments as they are available. Meanwhile, Salas, now 40, is to be congratulated both on his nuptials and a favorable outcome obtained pro se from the magistrate. See: Salas v. Pfeiffer, USDC (E.D. Cal.), Case No. 1:2 l-cv-00669.