Rastafarian Damon Landor wants to be able to sue prison guards for damages after having his dreadlocks shaved off at Raymond Laborde Correctional Centre in Louisiana, the US. He has a case before the US Supreme Court. Photo / US Supreme Court
By the time Damon Landor arrived at a Louisiana corrections centre to serve out a sentence for drug possession in 2020, he had maintained his Rastafarian vow to let his hair grow for nearly two decades.
Landor, whose dreadlocks almost reached his knees, revealed his faith to a guard and handed him a copy of a court decision that held that a federal law on religious freedom prevented Louisiana prisons from forcing Rastafarians to cut their hair.
The guard threw the ruling in the rubbish.
Despite pleas to the warden, Landor was handcuffed to a chair and held down by two correctional officers as his dreadlocks were forcibly sheared.
Landor was devastated - lengthy dreadlocks are seen as a physical embodiment of Rastafarians’ devotion and spiritual strength.
The United States Supreme Court took up his quest for justice today, but a majority of the justices appeared sceptical of his legal arguments during nearly two hours of arguments.
The question is not whether Landor was mistreated - the Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections has already acknowledged that - but whether he can sue the individual prison officials and guards for damages.
The members of the conservative majority expressed doubt that the law allowed Landor to pursue such claims or that the defendants had been given proper notice they could be held personally liable and that the law permitted Landor to seek a monetary award.
“Where did the individual defendants agree to be bound?” Justice Neil Gorsuch asked.
The court’s three liberals pushed back on those questions.
“I’m trying to understand how Congress has said it any clearer,” said Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, asserting that federal law gave Landor the authority to bring his suit.
The Supreme Court has greatly expanded religious liberties in high-profile cases in recent terms.
They include allowing religious parents to remove their children from public school lessons involving LGBTQ-themed books, affirming a football coach’s right to pray on a field at a public school, and protecting a Christian web designer who did not want to serve same-sex couples.
Landor’s case presents the latest opportunity to push that envelope further. But a ruling for him would run up against another pattern in the court’s decisions - cutting down on the ability of prisoners to get compensation for ill-treatment in custody.
A suit against the prison employees is one of the few avenues Landor can pursue to be compensated, because a 2011 Supreme Court ruling bars prisoners in cases like his from seeking damages from the state.
Frank Ravitch, a professor at Michigan State University and an expert on the intersection of law and religion, said the case departs in an important way from the court’s recent string of religious liberties cases, which mostly have involved Christians.
The conservative majority on the court has pared back the First Amendment’s establishment clause, which mandates the separation of church and state, while bolstering the free exercise clause, which bars the government from putting restraints on religious practice.
“To the extent they’ve expanded free exercise rights, they’ve done so in a way that predominantly benefits socially conservative Christians,” Ravitch said.
The legal dispute revolves around a federal law called the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUIPA), which allows inmates to sue to correct alleged abuses of religious rights.
A federal judge and an appeals court ruled against Landor, finding the law did not allow him to sue officials at the Raymond Laborde Correctional Centre for damages in their individual capacity. All other federal courts that have examined the issue have come to the same conclusion.
The appeals court said the law’s language was ambiguous about letting plaintiffs collect damages from individual officials.
It also found that Congress cannot impose money-damages liability on state officials in such cases unless they receive federal funds. The prison officials at Laborde had not.
Zack Tripp, a lawyer for Landor, told the justices that allowing suits like Landor’s would be an effective deterrent to prevent the abuse of prisoners’ rights. If defendants can’t collect damages, prison officials “can treat the law like garbage”, he said.
“It is the poster child for RLUIPA violation,” Tripp said of Landor’s case.
In filings, Landor’s lawyers pointed out that the Supreme Court held in 2020 that a “sister statute” of RLUIPA that also aims to protect religious liberty and employs the same language allows a plaintiff to sue a government official in his or her individual capacity for damages. Landor says the court should find that RLUIPA offers the same opportunity.
Tripp said Landor was not available for an interview, but since his release Landor has begun regrowing his dreadlocks.
The Louisiana attorney-general and Department of Public Safety and Corrections wrote in briefs that the state “condemns” in “the strongest possible terms” what happened to Landor. They said they have changed grooming policy in response.
Nevertheless, they said the courts rightly found against Landor. They argue that RLUIPA and its sister statute are structured differently, so it would be incorrect for the court to extend the relief that Landor is seeking.
Louisiana Solicitor-General Benjamin Aguinaga told the justices if the court were to adopt Landor’s position it would “radically expand congressional power”. He said Congress should amend RLUIPA to make clear that prisoners could sue for damages.
“The answer is across the street, not here,” Aguinaga said.
The state also argues that ruling for Landor could open the door to lawsuits being filed against individual government officials in other areas of federal law, such as Title IX, the landmark statute that prohibits sex discrimination in education. That argument seemed to concern some of the justices today.
A decision in Landor’s case is expected by the middle of next year.
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