KNOXVILLE, Tenn — A Muslim woman is suing Knox County and its sheriff after she says a Sheriff's Office employee illegally and improperly posted to their public website a mugshot of her without her head covering.
Layla Soliz of Knoxville filed the lawsuit Monday in U.S. District Court in Knoxville. She seeks compensatory damages of at least $250,000 and unspecified punitive damages.
Soliz also is demanding that the uncovered photo of her be forever expunged so that it cannot ever resurface.
"Requiring an observant Muslim woman to remove her hijab in the presence of men who are not her family members substantially burdens her religious faith," the lawsuit states. "Requiring an observant Muslim woman to remove her hijab in front of men who are not her family members is humiliating and degrading -- akin to requiring a woman to take off her shirt in public."
The Knox County Sheriff's Office referred comment about the litigation to the county law department.
Named as defendants besides the county are Sheriff Tom Spangler and Sgt. Jonathan Burgess.
In May, Soliz took part along with her husband and others in a vigil in support of the Palestinian people on the University of Tennessee campus. Police ultimately arrested multiple people.
Soliz was charged with criminal trespass, a misdemeanor. The case has been awaiting grand jury review for months after being forwarded out of Knox County General Sessions Court, court records show.
During the arrest process, Soliz and others were processed for booking. That included photographing her for a mugshot.
Soliz alleges that as a Muslim woman, her hijab is part of her routine garb. In her faith, men outside of her family are not supposed to see her hair. That's why she wears a hijab in public.
Federal law protects her right to wear a hijab. Furthermore, she argues, KCSO policy is very specific about how women who wear such a headdress are to be processed.
If a mugshot must be taken of a Muslim woman without her hijab, KCSO policy states it must not be uploaded and published to the public, such as the KCSO public website, the lawsuit states.
Only a mugshot showing an arrestee with a religious head covering is to be made public, the lawsuit quotes policy as stating.
Before Soliz had been booked, an attorney cautioned KCSO employees that Soliz was an observant Muslim woman and that they should not publish publicly a photo of her without her hijab, according to the lawsuit.
Nevertheless, that's what happened.
Burgess, a KCSO sergeant, "published (Soliz's) uncovered booking photograph to the Knox County Sheriff's Office website," the complaint states.
The lawsuit includes communication the morning after the arrest between a night shift commander and other KCSO personnel noting there'd been "3 conversations" with Burgess about how the mugshot should be handled.
A third-party website noted the mugshot at the time and disseminated it, wrongfully revealing her uncovered head to others, according to the lawsuit. It was subsequently taken down.
For most Muslim women, wearing a hijab is a way to practice modesty. Hijab types may differ between different Islamic sects.
Soliz said in May she felt violated by the publication of her mugshot without her headscarf.
"I have done my best to practice and to uphold, as I said, for many, many years. So for, suddenly, after all of those years of doing my best to keep that part of my physical self private — to suddenly now have my image without hijab posted online is just really violating and really upsetting," she said.
The complaint was filed on Soliz's behalf by Daniel Horwitz, Sarah L. Martin and Melissa Dix of Nashville. She said she did not want any other woman to go through a similar experience.
Joshua Hedrick, a Knoxville attorney, said most of the time lawsuits are settled outside of court.
"Most of the time when you have a case like this, there's less of an argument about 'what happened' and more an argument about 'what do we do about it?' I think it's without question that there was a policy in place and I think it's without question that this photograph was published and that the publishing of the photograph violated the policy. I think those things are all relatively clear," he said.
Hedrick said once the photo without Soliz's hijab was posted, the sheriff's office no longer had control over what happened with the photo. He said the lawsuit could be settled in a number of ways.
"You could have what they call injunctive relief, which is where the court could order the sheriff's department to do or not do something. They could order additional training, they could order that the sheriff's department delete the images. They could order some other type of relief," said Hedrick.
He said the lawsuit could also end with the sheriff's office being told to pay money, as a way to ensure this doesn't happen in the future.
"Sometimes that's where you have punitive damages, when you have a defendant who is not following the policy and how do you make them? Sometimes you make them by saying, 'If you don't do this, you're gonna, it's gonna start costing you money.' So you better do it," said Hedrick.
WBIR reached out to KCSO for a comment on the lawsuit and was directed to the Knox County Law Director's Office. The office did not respond by the time of this story's publication.