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July 29, 2010 |
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| June 25, 2009 |
By: Billy Shields |
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he city of Coral Gables has won a public-records fight launched by a Santeria church that claimed city police targeted its followers when officers broke up a religious ceremony involving an animal sacrifice at a private home.
“This was much ado about nothing,” said Robert Glazier, a Miami solo practitioner who represented the city. “The judge essentially concluded that the city had given them all the public records there were.”
Miami-Dade Circuit Judge Ronald Friedman dismissed the public-records request two months ago that was filed by the Church of Lukumi Babalu Aye in July 2008. On Wednesday, he also denied the church’s request for attorney fees, ending the case.
The church filed a court petition after submitting several public-records requests with the city to turn over e-mail and photographs produced on the July 2007 police call. The city said that it had turned over all documents requested and that the church was seeking records that didn’t exist.
A total of 23 officers responded to the call and “entered the home with guns drawn and pointed at the ceremony participants which included elderly and children, desecrated the ceremonial site,” according to the petition.
The church requested the records based on its belief that the police response was excessive and objected to the city’s $5,000 bill for the records search.
“We produced everything from the outset,” countered Jennifer Cohen Glasser, an Akerman Senterfitt shareholder who also represented the city. “It was a year’s litigation for things we had already produced.”
At the time the petition was filed, church attorney David Aelion, a partner with the Aelion Firm in Miami, said the church was trying to determine what caused the police reaction. No charges were filed as a result of the police call.
The church claimed the city has an agenda to stifle Santeria religious practices.
“We want to get down to what triggered 23 police officers to show up with guns drawn and barricading off the street,” he said last year. “We want to get to what political influence might have pushed that envelope to make that happen. It’s very obviously stepping on constitutional rights here.”
Aelion did not return calls seeking comment by deadline.
The church is one of the first congregations established in the United States that practices the Afro-Caribbean religion known in the Spanish Caribbean as Santeria. Worldwide figures on its followers range from tens of thousands to tens of millions. The faith employs animal sacrifice in some of its ceremonies on behalf of religious spirits, and the sacrifices are generally followed by the consumption of the slaughtered animal. Chickens and goats are the most commonly sacrificed animals.
Lukumi Babalu Aye was hoping to build its petition, which alleged breaches of the First Amendment guarantee of religious freedom, on a high-profile U.S. Supreme Court decision won by the church in 1993. The church sued the city of Hialeah after the City Council passed an animal-cruelty ordinance designed to squelch the practice of religious animal sacrifice in 1987.
Billy Shields can be reached at (305) 347-6649.
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