Rabbis' Religious Freedom Defense Nixed in Kidnapping Case

By Charles Toutant
New Jersey Law Journal
March 23, 2015

http://www.njlawjournal.com/id=1202721374666/Rabbis-Religious-Freedom-Defense-Nixed-in-Kidnapping-Case?slreturn=20150224065958

A criminal trial will proceed against four rabbis after a federal judge in Trenton rejected their claims that charging them with kidnapping and beating Orthodox Jewish men who refused to grant their wives divorces represents a substantial imposition by government on their religious practice.

The defendants claimed their prosecution was barred by the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, but U.S. District Judge Freda Wolfson of the District of New Jersey said the government’s application of kidnapping laws to the four defendants does not substantially burden their religious exercise. The rabbis’ motion to dismiss the indictment failed because other, nonviolent means are available to convince a husband to grant his wife a religious divorce, Wolfson ruled.

The rabbis are also barred from raising their religious beliefs as a defense to the charges of kidnapping, attempted kidnapping and conspiracy to commit kidnapping, Wolfson said.

The ruling was issued as defendants Mendel Epstein, Jay Goldstein, David Aryeh Epstein and Binyamin Stimler were about two weeks into a trial on charges that they engaged in criminal means to facilitate Orthodox Jewish divorces, according to court documents. The charges stem from a sting operation in which the defendants agreed to accept $60,000 from an FBI agent posing as an Orthodox Jewish woman whose husband refused to grant her a divorce, as well as three actual kidnappings in which the defendants allegedly tied up and beat husbands who refused to grant their wives divorces, court documents said.