Supreme Court leans against Rastafarian man seeking to sue prison officials for cutting his dreadlocks

By John Fritze, CNN

(CNN) — The Supreme Court appeared unconvinced Monday that a devout Rastafarian whose dreadlocks were forcibly cut in prison five years ago should be able to sue correction officials for damages.

Damon Landor had a few weeks left in his sentence for drug possession when guards at a Louisiana prison handcuffed him to a chair and shaved off the knee-length dreadlocks he had grown over nearly two decades. Minutes earlier, Landor had handed them a judicial opinion requiring prisons to allow dreadlocks for religious purposes.

On the one hand, the case appeared tailor-made for a conservative Supreme Court that has consistently sided with religious interests in recent years. But over the course of nearly two hours of argument, it became clear that the conservative wing is far more concerned with allowing people to sue individual state officials as a way to enforce federal spending laws.

That’s largely because, several justices suggested, those individual state employees were not likely aware of the agreements states had made in exchange for federal funding.

“Look, the facts of this case are egregious,” said Justice Amy Coney Barrett, a member of the court’s conservative wing. But, she said, “we can’t decide a case just based on these facts.”

Justice Neil Gorsuch, another conservative who is among the court’s most ardent supporters of religious rights, suggested that under Landor’s theory, a cisgender woman trying out for a sports team on a college campus that receives federal funding could sue a coach personally for $1 million in damages for allowing a transgender woman onto that team.

It was a notable question in part because the court is expected in coming weeks to hear arguments on whether states may ban transgender athletes from competing on teams consistent with their gender identity.

“As I understand it,” Gorsuch said, the federal appeals courts “are unanimously against you and have been for many, many, many years.”

A panel of the 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Landor was not entitled to sue under a 25-year-old law intended to protect prisoners’ religious interests.

The conservative New Orleans-based 5th Circuit said that it “emphatically” condemned “the treatment that Landor endured,” but an earlier appeals court precedent settled the case against him. The full 5th Circuit ultimately decided against rehearing the case.

Landor, who began serving a five-month prison sentence in 2020 for drug possession, had previously taken a promise known as the Nazarite vow to not cut his hair.

He was incarcerated without incident at two other facilities before he was transferred to the Raymond Laborde Correctional Center with only a few weeks left in his sentence. And he came armed with a copy of an appeals court ruling from 2017 that allowed prisoners to have dreadlocks.

Landor’s case at the Supreme Court rests on the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act, or RLUIPA. Congress passed that law, and another that dealt with religious accommodation more widely, in response to a landmark but controversial 1990 precedent from the court. Five years ago, the justices ruled that the other law, which has nearly identical language, does allow people whose religious rights have been burdened to seek damages against government officials acting in their individual capacity.

But Louisiana countered that RLUIPA is effectively a spending contract between the federal government, which provides funding for state prisons, and state officials. The individual officials involved in Landor’s forced shaving were not a party to that contract, Louisiana said, so they can’t be held personally liable.

Chief Justice John Roberts said Landor’s argument that state employees had received notice rested on a “legal fiction.”

“I don’t think when the prison guard is hired, he says, ‘well, I want to see the federal conditions that you agreed to under the contract,’” Roberts said.

The court’s three-justice liberal wing saved most of its toughest questions for Louisiana’s attorney.

The court is likely to hand down a decision in the case next year.

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