Prison inmate Jeb Daly filed a lawsuit against the Massachusetts Department of Corrections after prison authorities denied his access to the book “Life of a Klansman” by Edward Ball.
Prison officials confiscated the book claiming the “content, photo images and symbols in the book would jeopardize institutional security.”
Nevertheless, according to Daly, the prison regularly plays videos of Louis Farrakhan on the prison-sanctioned television channel “advocating hate of White People (AKA, ‘the blue-eyed Devil’).”
A superior court judge dismissed Daly’s case.
Daly appealed.
Today the Appeals Court issued a slip opinion reversing the superior court’s decision.
According to the Appeals Court,
Here, we conclude that Daly’s complaint plausibly alleges that the defendants are violating his constitutional rights by allowing inflammatory media against one race to be distributed, while not allowing Daly to possess anti-racist material that may be perceived as inflammatory against another race. Taking these allegations as true, as we must do at this stage, we conclude that where the defendants have banned expression of one potentially inflammatory viewpoint but have allowed the expression of its counterpoint, it is plausible that the defendants’ ban of the book was not pursuant to legitimate penological interests.
The full text of the slip opinion is attached below.