There is no doubt that Pitre has been very observant for years now. Currently incarcerated at Clallam Bay, he wears a yarmulke and a prayer shawl and faithfully celebrates the Jewish Sabbath and holidays. He talks about how his faith helps him in daily life. "It deals with how to live rather than how to prepare for your death," says Pitre. "I do my best to try to do Orthodox practice. There are 613 commandments. Your day flies by. I pray three times a day. It makes me a better person. It makes me a better citizen. I sure have made more screwups than your average person. It can help me make a difference." Pitre also says that he encounters hostility from both staff and prisoners on account of his faith. When he arrived at Clallam Bay in 2003, somebody slipped a swastika under his door. "I wasn't going to get scared away by the neo-Nazis," says Pitre. Prisoners would come up to him and say, "Some people don't like having a Jew on mainline" (in the prison's regular population), according to Pitre.
Clallam Bay chaplain Morlin says Pitre performs a valuable service. "There's a lot of people who doubt his sincerity, but he's the only one who keeps the Jewish religion going" at the prison. "If he wasn't here, we wouldn't have anything," Morlin says. Pitre holds a Jewish Sabbath service every week and reminds the chaplains of upcoming Jewish holy days and what needs to be done for them. Morlin says other prisoners, including Jews and non-Jews, participate in the services or in Jewish education with Pitre. "He does the best he can. If he didn't do it, it wouldn't be done," Morlin says, adding that Pitre knows more about Judaism than some of the inmates born into the faith.
Kevin P. Casey
Gary Friedman, chairman of Jewish Prisoner Services International.
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Friedman finds the situation appalling: "I don't know what [Pitre] is teaching out there. He calls it basic Judaism. He doesn't know what basic Judaism is. What he is teaching is not right." Pitre, Friedman says, is engaged in another of his outrageous scams. "The guy is a master manipulator," says Friedman. "All his schemes have been extremely complex. He has convinced other people to commit his murders for him."
Friedman says he has received information from another prisoner about the basis for this latest con game. While in prison, Pitre married for a third time. Under regulations, a prisoner is only eligible for conjugal visits with his wife if he was married before being imprisoned. Friedman says Jewish law is very clear: A husband must provide his wife with her conjugal rights. Friedman says Pitre was going to sue the Department of Corrections and claim that the prison's rules violated his religious rights as a Jew. "He will challenge the conjugal visiting rights," says Friedman. "He will argue that he is being denied his religious rights." Pitre says that is completely untrue. He offers as evidence that he is no longer married, but he doesn't explain that he was divorced just six months ago.
Friedman thinks the state should deny Pitre's claim of Judaism because the prisoner's faith is demonstrably insincere. "His own beliefs about Judaism are not consistent with Judaism," says Friedman. "He is challenging Jewish law—that is blatantly insincere." Friedman believes that Pitre's unwillingness to accept the established rabbinical hierarchy's view that he is not Jewish is clear evidence of his bad faith.
It's hard to imagine the courts upholding such a standard. Friedman's idea seems to completely rely on religious law for judging sincerity, whereas the courts have interpreted religious freedom to mean that religious belief is an individual choice. Religious institutions are, of course, private groups, and they can choose whom to allow as members or who can participate in services. Yet the First Amendment allows each American to be free of state interference in practicing his own version of religious belief. While it is distasteful, that cherished freedom protects a convicted murderer and con man who has constructed his own peculiar version of Judaism as much as it protects you and me.
ghowland@seattleweekly.com
