Supreme Court rules against Rastafarian man in religious rights case
by Lisa Hornung · UPIJune 23 (UPI) -- The Supreme Court ruled Tuesday against a devout Rastafarian man who sued prison officials after they held him down and cut off his dreadlocks.
The precedent could make it more difficult for prisoners of other religions to defend their religious rights.
Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote the opinion for the 6-3 decision. It was a rare decision against religious liberty for the conservative majority. The three who dissented were liberal justices, with Justice Ketanji Brown-Jackson writing the dissent.
"Mr. Landor would have us hold, for the first time, that so long as a penny of federal spending makes its way to an individual, however indirectly, Congress can regulate his conduct directly based on the fiction that he has consented to regulation," Gorsuch wrote. "None of that is consistent with our precedents."
The plaintiff, Damon Landor, was sentenced to five months in prison in 2020 for marjuana possession. He was near the end of his sentence when he was transferred to a new prison. He had been held without incident for his entire sentence.
At Raymond Laborde Correctional Center in Cottonport, La., the guards told him to remove his dreadlocks, which he hadn't cut for nearly 20 years, following his religion. The locks reached to his knees.
He had brought a copy of a 2017 legal opinion that said inmates must be allowed to keep their dreadlocks under federal law. When he showed it to the prison guards, one of them threw it in the trash, he said in a court document.
Two guards handcuffed him to a chair and shaved his head bald.
His argument to the court was based on the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act.
But Louisiana countered that RLUIPA is a spending contract between state officials and the federal government, which funds state prisons, so the officers couldn't be held personally liable.
The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Landor was not entitled to sue. The panel said that it condemned the treatment that Landor suffered, but that precedent settled the case against him.
Rachel Laser, president and CEO of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, told CNN that the decision was hypocritical.
"Once again, we see a court that will bend over backward for the religious freedom of Christians but allows the government to trample the religious freedom of non-Christians," Laser said.
Jackson argued that the ruling will give religious prisoners fewer options.
"Prisoners like Landor who suffer violations of their religious freedom in state prisons -- no matter how blatant -- will often be left remediless," Jackson wrote. "And encroachments on prisoners' statutory rights are likely to happen with fair frequency, as state-empowered prison officials will have little incentive to abide by federal law, even if it is handed to them on a piece of paper."