SCOTUS says Rastafarian can't sue prison guards who violated his faith and cut off his dreadlocks

Damon Landor showed officers the law protecting his religious beliefs. They shaved his head anyway. The Supreme Court just let them off the hook.

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The Supreme Court has made it official: Religious freedom only applies if you’re a conservative Christian. The conservative super-majority ruled 6-3 on Tuesday, along partisan lines, that a Rastafarian man whose hair was cut off against his will—violating his religious beliefs—had no legal remedies available to him.

The case centered around Damon Landor, who hadn’t cut his hair in decades because he follows the Nazarite vow—which includes a reference to Numbers 6:5: “… No razor may be used on their head… they must let their hair grow long.”

He continued that vow even after entering two Louisiana jails in 2020, for a five-month sentence over a drug-related charge. When he was transferred to a third facility—the Raymond Laborde Correctional Center—Landor worried they might try to cut his hair to fit in with inmate grooming policies, so he showed officers paperwork that said federal law was on his side: The Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act of 2000 (RLUIPA) basically says prisons that receive federal funding can’t violate someone’s religious beliefs unless there’s a really good reason for it.

The officers didn’t care. They threw his paperwork in the trash, handcuffed him to a chair, and shaved off his hair.

Damon Landor (screenshot via YouTube)

He later sued, seeking damages from both the prison and the individual officers for violating his rights. The lower courts ruled against him, but the Supreme Court took up his case. Unfortunately, the conservatives have now also dismissed his arguments, leaving him with no more recourse.

Writing for the majority, Justice Neil Gorsuch said the individual officers never consented to following RLUIPA, so they couldn’t be held accountable for what they did… as if it was okay for them to violate the law because they didn’t know any better. Even though the state-run prison received federal funding and essentially agreed to follow federal law as a result, he argued, the same couldn’t be said of the employees.

In this case, Gorsuch continued, the Louisiana Department of Corrections “does not dispute that it is a recipient of federal funds” and “that it has agreed” to be sued by private plaintiffs under RLUIPA “as a condition of accepting those funds.” But Landor does not contend that the prison officials who are the defendants in his lawsuit have “voluntarily and knowingly consented to answer private suits under RLUIPA,” Gorsuch noted, and therefore his lawsuit against them cannot go forward. Gorsuch wrote, for example, that it did not matter that the prison officials received paychecks from the Louisiana Department of Corrections, which in turn received federal funding, so that they “should be deemed to have implicitly consented to RLUIPA liability.”

If that sounds ridiculous, that’s because it is. Alexis Romero and Mark Joseph Stern of Slate couldn’t believe that line of reasoning:

… the state officials in this case arguably did agree to be bound by federal law. After all, they signed an employment contract with a prison that receives federal funding by virtue of RLUIPA. State officials are trained on their inmates’ rights, and prison litigation has been around for centuries, under RLUIPA and other statutes. There’s no serious argument that these state officials were blind to the consequences that might come from violating the rights of the prisoners they’re in charge of.

The liberal justices said as much in their dissent, adding that the majority just gave federal employees permission to ignore RLUIPA whenever they want.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, dissented. She argued that, as a result of the majority’s ruling, “[p]risoners like Landor who suffer violations of their religious freedom in state prisons—no matter how blatant—will often be left remediless. And encroachments on prisoners’ statutory rights are likely to happen with fair frequency, as state-empowered prison officials will have little incentive to abide by federal law, even if it is handed to them on a piece of paper.”

To get a little more technical, Gorsuch justified his decision by saying his issue was with the way Congress worded RLUIPA, but with a dysfunctional Congress run by Republicans, there’s no quick fix even if the correction is obvious. (Ian Millhiser of Vox notes that this could have a serious effect on women who need emergency abortions in red states.)

What makes this decision all the more infuriating is that everyone seems to agree that Landor’s rights were violated. The conservatives on SCOTUS said it. The state admitted it, too, even saying they had changed their rules to prevent this kind of incident in the future. But the ruling still means Landor can’t receive any sort of compensation for what he went through.

“We condemn the conduct as alleged in this case and have taken steps to prevent this problem from recurring, but we are grateful the court agreed with the state in this matter,” Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill, a Republican, said in a statement.

She added that religious rights are “deeply important” but that the state has its own laws that protect them.

Americans United for Separation of Church and State had filed an amicus brief in this case on Landor’s behalf, saying RLUIPA permitted lawsuits against individual officers. They even said, “Without the possibility of individual liability, officers (and institutions) can blatantly and/or repeatedly violate RLUIPA with few to no consequences.” They were, of course, disappointed with Tuesday’s decision:

“Today’s U.S. Supreme Court decision endangers the religious freedom of incarcerated people, like Damon Landor, who are particularly vulnerable to abuse and having unnecessary burdens placed on their religious exercise. Once again, we see a court that will bend over backward for the religious freedom of Christians, but allows the government to trample the religious freedom of non-Christians. We can only hope this faulty decision doesn’t embolden more prison officials to ignore the religious-freedom rights of incarcerated people to observe their faith as long as they don’t harm others.”

That’s really the big takeaway here. The Supreme Court has rewarded Christians who filed religious freedom lawsuits even when the facts were not on their side (like Joe Kennedy) or when they suffered no actual damages (like the wedding website creator). Here’s a Rastafarian whose story is not in dispute and who actually suffered, and the Supreme Court’s conservatives are giving him a pat on the back and nothing of value. Hell, Gorsuch, who went out of his way to give Kennedy a victory by lying about the nature of his case, is the same person now saying there’s nothing he can do for Landor.

This man literally waved the law in front of the officers but the Supreme Court insisted those officers can’t be held accountable for not following the rules. What else could Landor have possibly done?

Even more concerning is how this decision gives a green light to other officers who may want to sidestep the law when it involves a non-Christian inmate, according to Elizabeth Reiner Platt, the director of the Law, Rights & Religion Project.

Without any threat of financial punishment, employees of state jails and prisons can trample inmates’ religious rights with impunity. And while courts may still order prisons to accommodate incarcerated people’s religious beliefs — such as by providing halal meals — this means little in cases like Landor’s, when the damage has already been done.

Landor can still theoretically pursue damages through the state courts, but the bottom line is that the Supreme Court used this case to make it even harder for a non-Christian to receive justice even when there’s no dispute about what happened to him. It’s fair to wonder if the outcome would have been different here if a Christian—specifically a white Christian—prisoner was on the receiving end of a faith-based infraction.

If there are no punishments for violating someone’s rights, they’re not really rights at all.

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