Prisoner Claims TB Testing Violates Religious Freedom

In Perry v. Levegood, 2005 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 20964 (ED Pa., Sept. 21, 2005), a prisoner alleged that his religious freedom rights were infringed when prison nurses forced him, without good reason, to take a tuberculosis immunization test. A Pennsylvania federal district court held that preventing the spread of TB is a legitimate penological interest, and that if the Department of Corrections' TB testing policy was reasonably related to that interest, it would survive a First Amendment challenge. However, the court allowed the plaintiff to move to additional discovery before determining whether the TB testing policy was applied correctly in this case. The court dismissed the prisoner's claim that the testing also violated the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.