US Supreme Court considers case of Rastafarian man shaved bald in prison

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By Andrew Chung

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The U.S. Supreme Court is due on Monday to hear arguments in a Rastafarian man’s bid to sue state prison officials in Louisiana after guards held him down and shaved him bald in violation of his religious beliefs in a case brought under a federal law protecting incarcerated people from religious discrimination.

The justices will hear arguments in an appeal by Damon Landor, whose religion requires him to let his hair grow, of a lower court’s decision to throw out his lawsuit because it found the statute at issue did not allow him to sue individual officials for monetary damages.

The law, called the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act of 2000, or RLUIPA, prohibits religious discrimination by state and local governments in land-use regulations and also protects the religious rights of people confined to institutions such as prisons and jails. 

President Donald Trump’s administration is participating in the case, backing Landor.

The Supreme Court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority, has expanded the rights of religious people and institutions in a series of rulings in recent years. 

Landor, 46, had grown his hair over 20 years into long locks that reached his knees. In 2020, near the end of a five-month prison sentence for drug possession, Landor was transferred to the Raymond Laborde Correctional Center in Cottonport, Louisiana. 

There, Landor reminded officials that the New Orleans-based 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals had already ruled in a 2017 case that Louisiana’s policy of cutting the hair of Rastafarians violated the 2000 law, even handing over a copy of that ruling. 

But a guard threw it in the trash, according to court documents, and Landor was then handcuffed to a chair, held down and shaved. 

Landor, who lives in Slidell, Louisiana, sued, but a federal judge threw out his case. In 2023, the 5th Circuit upheld that decision. 

“We emphatically condemn the treatment that Landor endured,” the 5th Circuit wrote in its ruling, but nevertheless said the law does not allow individual officials to be personally held liable for money damages. 

Landor’s lawyers told the Supreme Court that RLUIPA is similar to a 1993 law called the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which prohibits religious infringement by the federal government. 

In 2020, the Supreme Court allowed for money damages claims under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act in a case involving a bid by three Muslim U.S. citizens to sue FBI agents who they accused of placing the men on the government’s “no-fly list” for refusing to become informants.

Without a damages remedy, RLUIPA would provide no deterrent against abuse by officials, Landor’s lawyers told the Supreme Court in a written filing. 

“In an instant, they stripped Landor of decades of consistent religious practice and a defining feature of his identity. That is shocking, offensive and lawless,” the lawyers said. 

Louisiana said that there is a settled understanding that damages are unavailable under RLUIPA, emphasizing that in addition to the 5th Circuit, nine other federal appellate courts agreed. 

The law applies to state and local entities that receive federal funding. As such, the state also said that the provision permitting lawsuits to hold officials individually liable exceeds the power of Congress under the Constitution’s so-called Spending Clause to impose conditions only on the state or government entity that is the actual recipient of the federal funds. 

(Reporting by Andrew Chung)