Green v. Haskell County Bd. of Comm’rs

• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit
• Citation: 568 F.3d 784 (10th Cir. 2009)
• Decided: 2009
• Church-State Issue: Government-Sponsored Religion

Description

A Ten Commandments monument, newly installed on a county courthouse's grounds, violated the Establishment Clause because in light of its history and context, the monument had a predominantly religious effect.

Display: An 8 x 3-foot stone block inscribed with the Ten Commandments on one side (facing the street), and the Mayflower Compact on the other, newly installed on the county courthouse grounds. The monument joined a log cabin, a sidewalk paved with personal-message bricks, two benches, a World War memorial, Vietnam and Korean War memorials, a rose garden and birdbath, a monument honoring the Choctaw Nation, and a monument honoring all unmarked graves in the county.

Decision: After a bench trial, the district court held that the display was constitutional, but the Court of Appeals reversed, finding the monument violated Lemon’s effect prong.

Effect: The court cited a panoply of factors which, taken together, would lead a reasonable observer to perceive a governmental endorsement of religion: the county was a small, tightly-knit community in which the commissioners would be viewed as acting and speaking for the county in all public appearances; the monument’s private donor announced his religious motivation to the board, which promptly approved his request to install the monument despite their awareness of potential adverse legal consequences; the board approved only the Ten Commandments, and the inclusion of the Mayflower Compact was entirely the donor’s doing; the Compact and Commandments lacked any logical relation, and the board had done nothing to tie them together; commissioners spoke at the monument’s installation ceremony and were photographed with it; after being sued, the board maintained the monument, and commissioners spoke out in its favor in religious terms, including a religious rally; while other markers and monuments populated the courthouse grounds, they were scattered about and lacked any unifying secular theme; and finally, unlike the Van Orden monument, which had stood unchallenged for 40 years, the county was sued almost immediately upon the monument’s installation.