Indiana Supreme Court Has Chance to Fix Disastrous Ruling

Last month, Secular Pro-Life sounded the alarm about a dangerous pro-abortion decision by the Court of Appeals of Indiana. That court sided with plaintiffs who wanted religious exceptions to Indiana’s pro-life law. But the court’s logic was much broader than that, opening the door to any religiously motivated homicide, regardless of the victim’s age. In short, they accidentally legalized honor killings! Our analysis was covered by other media outlets, including LifeNews, Live Action News, and Twitchy.

And now, that same argument has found its way into an amicus (friend of the court) brief at the Indiana Supreme Court:

The Court of Appeals’ rule, effectively treating secular exceptions as fatal under strict scrutiny, would lead to absurd results.

All laws need limits. For example, “even . . . bans on intentional homicide have exceptions—execution of a lawful sentence, killing in war, police killing of a dangerous fleeing felon, killing in self-defense or in defense of another, and disconnecting life-sustaining equipment at a patient’s request.” Eugene Volokh, A Common-Law Model for Religious Exemptions, 46 UCLA L. Rev. 1465, 1540 (1999). Criminals can also receive an insanity defense for an otherwise wrongful killing. A per se rule that secular exceptions require religious exemptions would mean that religiously motivated killing—honor killing, stoning, child sacrifice—must be permitted because of these exceptions. Yet no court has ever held that religious accommodations are warranted from a homicide law.

Similarly, if the law allowed a doctor to perform an osteotomy (a procedure that requires the breaking of a bone to reshape or realign a bone), a per se rule triggering accommodations based on secular exemptions would mean that a parent could seek a religious accommodation to beat and break the child’s bones for religious reasons.

For that matter, the general common-law defense of necessity, see Walker v. State, 381 N.E.2d 88, 88–89 (Ind. 1978), would trigger religious exemptions from all criminal laws. After all, the defense effectively gives each criminal law at least one exception, which would then require a religious exemption, by the lower court’s logic. That cannot be right and finds no support in the doctrine. The fact that the Court of Appeals’ decision would require this result only underscores its error.

The brief is on behalf of law professors with whom I am not acquainted. I have no idea if they were influenced by our article or if this is simply an instance of great minds thinking alike. Either way, I am thrilled that the Indiana Supreme Court will have an opportunity to address the lower court’s egregiously misguided ruling.