Supreme Court to hear Rastafarian prisoner's suit over shaved dreadlocks
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The first four months of Landor's incarceration were uneventful. Then he was transferred to the Raymond Laborde Correctional Center in Cottonport, La. According to his lawsuit, he presented a copy of the 2017 decision to a guard, who threw it in the trash.
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After consulting the warden, two guards handcuffed Landor to a chair, held him down, and shaved his head to the scalp.
'When I was strapped down and shaved, it felt like I was raped,' Landor said in a statement last year. 'And the guards, they just didn't care. They will treat you any kind of way. They knew better than to cut my hair, but they did it anyway.'
The question the justices agreed to decide is whether the 2000 religious freedom law allows suits against prison officials for money.
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The case is in an early stage, and courts have assumed that Landor's account of what happened to him is true. Officials in Louisiana have so far not disputed it.
Elizabeth B. Murrill, Louisiana's attorney general, agreed the conduct Landor described was appalling, but she said the 2000 law did not allow his suit.
'The allegations in petitioner's complaint are antithetical to religious freedom and fair treatment of state prisoners,' Murrill wrote in a brief urging the justices to deny review. 'Without equivocation, the state condemns them in the strongest possible terms.'
She added that 'the state has amended its prison grooming policy to ensure that nothing like petitioner's alleged experience can occur.'
Last month, the Trump administration filed a supporting brief urging the justices to hear Landor's case and to rule that he may pursue his suit.
Landor's case does not seem to be an outlier. At least five other Rastafarians have filed lawsuits in Louisiana saying their dreadlocks were forcibly shaved by prison officials.
Landor sued the warden and the guards under the 2000 law, the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act. When the case reached the 5th Circuit, the same court that had ruled that the law protected Rastafarian prisoners' dreadlocks, a different three-judge panel said that 'we
emphatically
condemn the treatment that Landor endured."
But that condemnation was all the relief the panel was willing to offer Landor. It ruled that he was still not entitled to sue the prison officials for money because the 2000 law had not specifically authorized such suits.
In his petition asking the Supreme Court to hear his case, Landor said the 5th Circuit's ruling was at odds with a 2020 decision interpreting identical language in the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993.
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In that case, the court ruled in favor of Muslim men who said their religious rights had been violated when FBI agents put them on the no-fly list in retaliation for refusing to become government informants.
The court did not find the question of whether they could sue for money difficult. In a brisk nine-page opinion for a unanimous court in 2020 in the case, Tanzin v. Tanvir, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote that 'in the context of suits against government officials, damages have long been awarded as appropriate relief.'
In Landor's case, the 5th Circuit ruled that the 2000 law, which applies to the states, was meaningfully different from the 1993 law, which, after the Supreme Court limited its sweep, applies only to the federal government.
The full 5th Circuit declined to rehear the panel's ruling. But nine judges in the majority urged the Supreme Court to clarify matters in the case, Landor v. Louisiana Department of Corrections and Public Safety, No. 23-1197.
Prison officials, Judge Edith Brown Clement wrote, 'knowingly violated Damon Landor's rights in a stark and egregious manner, literally throwing in the trash our opinion holding that Louisiana's policy of cutting Rastafarians' hair violated the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act before pinning Landor down and shaving his head. Landor clearly suffered a grave legal wrong.'
But whether he can sue prison officials for money, Clement wrote, 'is a question only the Supreme Court can answer.'
Zack Tripp, a lawyer with Weil, Gotshal & Manges, which represents Landor, said he hoped the answer was yes.
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'Nobody should have to experience what Mr. Landor endured,' he said in a statement. 'A decision in Mr. Landor's favor will go a long way towards holding officers accountable for egregious violations of religious liberty, and ensuring that what happened to Mr. Landor does not happen to anyone else.'
This article originally appeared in
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