WASHINGTON – A Supreme Court that has been increasingly protective of religious rights is expected to be sympathetic to a Rastafarian asking for help after Louisiana prison guards forcibly shaved his dreadlocks.

But if the justices are not attuned to the spiritual significance of the lengthy locks when they take up Damon Landor’s appeal on Nov. 10, perhaps religious scholars will have convinced the court of their significance.

Seven of the Supreme Court justices were raised Catholic. Because dreadlocks are a connection to the living essence of the universe, cutting them off is like keeping a Catholic from receiving the Eucharist, five experts on the religion wrote in a filing supporting Landor.

“To be irrevocably deprived of such an important symbolic and physical connection to God against one’s will,” they wrote, “is a brutal and dehumanizing intrusion into a Rastafari’s religious liberty that demands an avenue for recompense.”

Religious and civil rights groups support right to sue

The court will debate on Nov. 10 whether Landor can seek damages from the prison officials who cut off the knee-length locks he’d been growing for nearly a decade.

Landor has the backing of the Department of Justice and a variety of religious and civil liberties groups across the ideological spectrum.

Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative group that squared off against the liberal American Civil Liberties Union in a case last term about religious charter schools, teamed up with the ACLU and others in a brief supporting Landor.

The court has also heard from groups representing Jews, Baptists, Muslims, Catholics, Protestants, Quakers, Unitarians, Seventh-Day Adventists, Hindus and members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Associations representing Native Americans told the court that the case is particularly important to them as “the forced shearing of Native people’s hair continued even after the United States turned away from more explicit bans on Native religious exercise.”

High Court previously backed prisoner’s right to grow a beard

A decade ago, the Supreme Court ruled that a Muslim man’s religious rights were violated when the Arkansas Department of Corrections would not let him grow a beard because of security concerns.

“Hair on the head is a more plausible place to hide contraband than a half-inch beard, and the same is true of an inmate’s clothing and shoes,” Justice Samuel Alito wrote in the court’s unanimous opinion. “Nevertheless, the department does not require inmates to go about bald, barefoot or naked.”

Both that 2015 case and Landor’s appeal rely on a law Congress passed unanimously in 2000 to protect prisoners’ religious rights.

This time, however, the dispute is not whether the Louisiana Department of Corrections and Public Safety must allow dreadlocks, as two of the state prisons that housed Landor in 2020 acknowledged before he was transferred to a third.

The question is whether – now that they’re gone – Landor can seek compensation.

`My locks are part of me and part of who I am’

Landor had shown officials at the third facility a copy of a court ruling that dreadlocks grown for religious reasons should be accommodated. But an intake guard threw the ruling in the trash and called in the warden, according to court filings.

When Landor couldn’t immediately meet the warden’s demand for court documentation of his religious beliefs, he was handcuffed to a chair while his dreadlocks were shaved off.

“My locks are a part of me and part of who I am,” Landor said in a statement to USA TODAY, recalling how he counted on his religion to help him survive incarceration. “So when they cut off my hair, they cut off my crown.”


Louisiana argues Rastafarian can’t sue prison officials

State officials have said they condemn what happened to Landor “in the strongest possible terms” and have emphasized that the corrections department has amended its grooming policy to prevent a repeat of his ordeal.

But they argue the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act doesn’t allow prisoners to sue for damages.

And they’ve warned that such lawsuits would trigger “numerous unintended consequences,” including making it even more difficult to staff jails and prisons.

Landor’s attorneys argue that without damages, the 2000 law doesn’t help him.

“There would be no remedy, no accountability, and RLUIPA’s soaring promise would ring hollow,” they told the court in a written brief. “That is clearly wrong. Congress did not enact RLUIPA so that state officers could freely ignore it.”

`Not a one-off problem’

In 2020, the high court ruled that Muslim men could sue FBI agents for damages if they claimed their religious rights were violated for being placed on the government’s no-fly list after refusing to serve as FBI informants.

That case involved a similar federal law protecting religious expression. But because RLUIPA involves state institutions, it operates differently, Louisiana argues. While states agree to follow federal rules when taking federal funding, that doesn’t create a personal liability for prison workers, the state says.

But the DOJ, and an array of interest groups, back Landor’s argument that prison officials can be sued – and need to be held accountable.

“This is not a one-off problem – not even as to Rastafarians,” lawyers for 44 religious organizations said in a filing.

A group of former high-ranking correction officials, including past leaders of prison systems in Texas and New York, said correctional officers “know and expect to be liable when they violate a prisoner’s clearly established civil rights.”

“Ample research shows that allowing such accommodations promotes rehabilitation, increases prison safety, moderates the likelihood of recidivism, and provides community both within and outside of prisons,” they wrote in a filing.

DOJ says case won’t lead to frivolous lawsuits

The DOJ argues a ruling for Landor wouldn’t trigger a flood of lawsuits from prisoners because there are safeguards against frivolous claims. Those include a 1996 law passed in response to prisoner litigation and a legal doctrine known as “qualified immunity” that protects officials in many circumstances.

University of Chicago law professor Samuel Bray said the case pits two trends against each other. The court has been both very friendly to religious liberty claims and very hostile to lawsuits seeking damages against government officials.

But the facts for Louisiana in this case are so bad, Bray said, that it will tip the balance in Landor’s favor.

“I predict,” Bray said, “he’s getting damages.”