By Andrew Chung
(Reuters) -The U.S. Supreme Court agreed on Monday to hear 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.
The justices took up 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 brought under a federal law that protects against religious infringement by state and local governments. The lower court found that this law did not permit Landor, 46, to sue individual officials for monetary damages.
The Supreme Court is due to hear the case in its next term, which begins in October. The court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority, has expanded the rights of religious individuals and institutions in a series of rulings in recent years.
The dispute concerns a federal law called the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act of 2000, which prohibits religious discrimination in land-use regulations and also protects the religious rights of people confined to institutions such as prisons and jails.
Landor 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 the statute at issue 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.
A lawyer for Landor, Zachary Tripp, welcomed Monday’s decision to hear the case.
“Nobody should have to experience what Mr. Landor endured,” Tripp said. “A decision in Mr. Landor’s favor will go a long way towards holding officers accountable for egregious violations of religious liberty, and ensuring that what happened to Mr. Landor does not happen to anyone else.”
In a filing to the Supreme Court, Louisiana said it has changed its grooming policy in prisons to prevent Landor’s experience from happening again. But the state urged the judges to reject the case, saying a ruling in Landor’s favor “would overwhelmingly exacerbate a crushing workforce problem” for states in staffing prisons around the country.
In another religious rights ruling, the Supreme Court on June 5 endorsed a bid by an arm of a Catholic diocese in Wisconsin for a religious exemption from the state’s unemployment insurance tax.
(Reporting by Andrew Chung in New York; Editing by Will Dunham)
