And the Supreme Court Said: That’s Fine. You Can’t Sue.
Damon Landor had a few weeks left in his sentence for drug possession when guards at a Louisiana prison handcuffed him to a chair and shaved off the knee-length dreadlocks he had grown over nearly two decades. Minutes earlier, Landor had handed his guards a judicial opinion demonstrating that they were required to allow dreadlocks for religious purposes. The guards tossed that opinion in the trash before holding Landor down and cutting his hair.
Read that sequence one more time. He showed them the court order. They threw the court order in the trash. They held him down. They shaved his head.
He had worn those locks for twenty years. He had taken a promise known as the Nazarite vow to not cut his hair. That vow is not decorative. It is not aesthetic. It is a covenant, undertaken in the name of God, expressed in the most physically permanent way a human being can express a religious commitment — by allowing the body to remain as it grows, uncut, as a daily living testimony of faith. They put handcuffs on him and cut it off.
Last week, six justices of the Supreme Court of the United States said: he cannot sue the people who did this to him.
The Decision
The court ruled 6-3 that Damon Landor cannot seek damages under a law called the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act, or RLUIPA. The court was divided along ideological lines, with conservatives in the majority and liberals dissenting.
The majority opinion was written by Neil Gorsuch. Writing for the six-member majority, Gorsuch maintained that the law imposes obligations only on the state or local entity receiving federal funds, not on individual employees, as they have not consented to be subject to lawsuits under the statute.
This is presented as a technicality. It is not a technicality. It is a decision about who the law protects and who it doesn’t, dressed up as a procedural ruling so the court doesn’t have to say the quiet part out loud.
The state did not contest that Landor was mistreated and said in court papers that the prison system has changed its grooming policy to ensure that other Rastafarian prisoners do not face similar situations. But Louisiana argued that it should not be liable for damages because RLUIPA applies to federal, not state, officials.
They admitted he was mistreated. They said they’ve fixed the policy. They said he still can’t have any money. And six justices agreed.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, in dissent, warned that “prisoners like Landor who suffer violations of their religious freedom in state prisons — no matter how blatant — will often be left remediless.” She added that “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.”
Handed to them on a piece of paper. Which they threw in the trash. Which the Supreme Court has now established carries no consequence.
The Pattern This Court Cannot Explain
The ruling saw the conservative majority depart from its regular support for religious claims, although recent high-profile wins tended to involve conservative Christians.
That sentence, from NBC News, contains the entire story in compressed form.
This court has expanded religious liberty protections aggressively, consistently, and with apparent conviction that the Free Exercise Clause is among the most important provisions in the Constitution. It has ruled for Christian schools seeking public funding. It has ruled for Christian employees seeking exemptions from anti-discrimination law. It has ruled for Christian business owners who don’t want to serve gay couples. It has ruled for Christian coaches who want to pray on public school football fields. The Religious Freedom Restoration Act, RLUIPA’s companion statute, was used to let corporations deny their employees contraception coverage on religious grounds.
Religious liberty is a core value of this court. Until Damon Landor’s case arrives.
Rachel Laser, the president and CEO of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, described the decision as 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,” said Laser.
The court has a response to this, which is that the Landor case turned on a statutory interpretation question — who can be sued under RLUIPA — not on whether Rastafarian religious practice deserves protection. This is technically true. It is also convenient to the point of being contemptible. If Damon Landor’s name were Damon Lancaster and his religious observance were a wooden cross worn around his neck, and guards had held him down and ripped it off his neck and thrown the court order establishing his right to wear it in the trash, this court’s majority would have found a way to let him sue. They would have found it important to find a way. The statutory interpretation question would have become less insurmountable.
The question of who can be held accountable for violating whose religious rights is, at some level, always a question of whose religion the enforcers take seriously.
What Remediless Means
Justice Jackson’s word deserves to sit with us for a moment. Remediless. The state of having no remedy. The state of having been wronged and having no recourse.
Damon Landor was handcuffed to a chair. His twenty years of religious observance were cut from his body against his will, in violation of a court order, by employees of a prison that accepted federal funds, in a country that has a law specifically designed to prevent exactly this from happening. He came out of that chair without his locks, without his twenty years, without the visible testament of his covenant. And the highest court in the land has told him he has no remedy.
Louisiana’s attorney general called the ruling correct. She said religious rights are “deeply important” — in the same statement in which she expressed gratitude that her state’s officials cannot be sued for violating them.
Deeply important. Unless you’re a Rastafarian in handcuffs in Cottonport, Louisiana.
What I Am Pointing At
My framing — no religious protections if you’re not Christian — is not perfectly precise as a legal description. The court did not say Rastafarians have no religious rights. It said the specific law Landor sued under doesn’t allow him to sue individual officials. But my framing is precisely correct as a description of the practical reality this court is building, case by case, decision by decision.
The practical reality is: if you are a Christian whose religious practice is burdened by a government actor, this court will find a way to give you relief. If you are a Rastafarian whose religious practice is violated in the most physical, direct, irreversible way imaginable — if government employees put you in handcuffs and cut off twenty years of religious observance while you hold a court order telling them they can’t — this court will find a procedural reason why you cannot be made whole.
That is not religious liberty. That is religious favoritism with extra steps.
The guards threw the court order in the trash. The Supreme Court said: and you still can’t sue them.
In a country founded on the principle that all men are created equal, the six conservatives on the Supreme Court have now established that some men’s religious freedom is more equal than others’.
Damon Landor’s locks will grow back, if he chooses. Twenty years cannot.