On Tuesday, the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) ruled against an incarcerated man in Louisiana seeking financial recourse against the actions of corrections officers who shaved his head, despite a federal court’s decision upholding the rights of prisoners to have long hair for religious reasons. In 2020, Damon Landor, a Rastafari, handed a copy of the court ruling to the guards who were seeking to cut his dreadlocks. The guards threw the document in the trash and shaved his head anyway.
In addition to their political and cultural symbolism, dreadlocks are seen as fulfilling the Nazarite vow described in the Bible and hold deep spiritual meaning for many who practice Rastafarianism.
The SCOTUS decision in Landor v. Louisiana Department of Corrections and Public Safety, which was split 6-3 along ideological lines, is a departure from the court’s recent trend of supporting religious freedom cases.
The court majority relied on a technicality in the Constitution’s spending clause as the basis for its decision.
In the dissenting opinion, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, writing for Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, wrote that the result of the decision is that “prisoners like Landor who suffer violations of their religious freedom in state prisons — no matter how blatant — will be left remediless.”
In a statement from the BJC (Baptist Joint Committee), which joined in a brief of the case, Chief Legal Officer Holly Hollman expressed disappointment. The decision “narrows the relief available when prisons violate the religious freedom of those in their custody,” Hollman said. “Both the lower court and the Supreme Court acknowledged that officials grossly violated Mr. Landor’s rights. Yet today the Court held that the statute’s promise of ‘appropriate relief against a government’ does not allow money damages against the individual officers responsible — weakening prisoners’ ability to seek justice and to deter future violations.”
Landor’s lawyers and other religious liberty advocates are pressing Congress to amend the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act to allow prisoners to obtain damages when their religious freedoms are violated.
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Senior Editor at Good Faith Media.