It’s a story heard before: A Muslim woman is jailed for refusing to remove her head scarf. Though such tales are commonplace in European nations, this latest chapter in the head-scarf debate hits a bit closer to home — Atlanta, to be precise. And it’s not an isolated incident.

A Georgia judge has held 40-year-old Lisa Valentine in contempt of court after she refused to uncover herself. That tenacity, the judge insisted, violated a court policy prohibiting people from wearing headgear during proceedings. Valentine was sentenced to ten days in prison.

But the attorney general says state law doesn’t allow or ban head scarves – it’s up to the discretion of the court. And apparently this court has a problem with it. That same judge last week removed a woman and her 14-year-old daughter for also refusing to remove their hijabs.

"I just felt stripped of my civil, my human rights," said Valentine, who was released with help from the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), which wants the U.S. Justice Department federal authorities to investigate her incident and other similar incidents in that state. Last year, a judge in southern Georgia also barred a woman wearing a hijab from the courtroom.

Here’s what happened to Valentine, according to CAIR:

According to the woman’s husband, she was seeking to enter the courtroom in Douglasville, GA, to deal with a matter related to a nephew’s traffic citation. After she walked through the security area, a bailiff allegedly told her she would not be permitted to enter the courtroom wearing her religiously mandated scarf. Frustrated at being prevented from entering the court, the woman reportedly uttered an expletive and sought to leave the area. As she attempted to leave, the bailiff reportedly handcuffed her and took her to the judge’s chambers where she was sentenced to ten days in jail for ‘contempt.’

"We ask the Department of Justice to investigate these troubling incidents to determine whether the women’s civil or religious rights were violated,” said CAIR spokesman Ibrahim Hooper. “Judges have the right to set standards of dress and behavior in their courtrooms, but those standards should not violate the constitutional right to free exercise of religion or block unencumbered access to our nation’s legal system."

The head scarf issue is a controversial one here in the U.S. Last month, a Southern California county said it would allow jailed Muslim women to wear them after settling a lawsuit with a woman who claimed that deputies violated her religious freedom by making her remove her hijab.