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Damon Landor is a Rastafarian. His faith requires him to let his hair grow long. When he started a five-month prison term for drug possession in Louisiana, his dreadlocks fell nearly to his knees.
Mr. Landor was wary of the state’s prison system, and he kept a copy of a 2017 judicial decision with him. That ruling, from a unanimous three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, said that Rastafarian inmates in Louisiana must be allowed to keep their dreadlocks under a 2000 federal law protecting prisoners’ religious freedom.
The first four months of Mr. Landor’s incarceration were uneventful. Then he was transferred to the Raymond Laborde Correctional Center in Cottonport, La. He presented a copy of the 2017 decision to a guard, who threw it in the trash.
After consulting the warden, two guards handcuffed Mr. Landor to a chair, held him down and shaved his head to the scalp.
“When I was strapped down and shaved, it felt like I was raped,” Mr. Landor said. “And the guards, they just didn’t care. They will treat you any kind of way. They knew better than to cut my hair, but they did it anyway.”
He sued the warden and the guards under the 2000 law, the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act. When the case reached the Fifth Circuit, the same court that had ruled that the law protected Rastafarian prisoners’ dreadlocks, a different three-judge panel said that “we emphatically condemn the treatment that Landor endured.”
But that italicized sympathy represented all of the relief the panel was willing to offer Mr. Landor. It ruled that he was not entitled to sue the prison officials for money.
This month, Mr. Landor asked the Supreme Court to hear his case. He said the Fifth Circuit’s ruling was at odds with a recent decision interpreting identical language in a sister statute, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993.
In that case, the court ruled in favor of Muslim men who said their religious rights had been violated when F.B.I. agents put them on the no-fly list in retaliation for refusing to become government informants.
The court did not find the question of whether they could sue for money difficult. In a brisk nine-page opinion for a unanimous court in 2020 in the case, Tanzin v. Tanvir, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote that “in the context of suits against government officials, damages have long been awarded as appropriate relief.”
In Mr. Landor’s case, the Fifth Circuit ruled that the 2000 law, which applies to the states, was meaningfully different from the 1993 law, which, after the Supreme Court limited its sweep, applies only to the federal government.
The full Fifth Circuit declined to rehear the panel’s ruling. But nine judges in the majority urged the Supreme Court to clarify matters in the case, Landor v. Louisiana Department of Corrections and Public Safety, No. 23-1197.
Prison officials, Judge Edith Brown Clement wrote, “knowingly violated Damon Landor’s rights in a stark and egregious manner, literally throwing in the trash our opinion holding that Louisiana’s policy of cutting Rastafarians’ hair violated the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act before pinning Landor down and shaving his head. Landor clearly suffered a grave legal wrong.”
But whether he can sue prison officials for money, Judge Clement wrote, “is a question only the Supreme Court can answer.”
Six judges dissented from the full appeals court’s refusal to rehear the panel’s ruling, saying the two federal laws must be read “in tandem” to allow Mr. Landor to sue for damages.
Mr. Landor’s experience seems commonplace in Louisiana. At least five other lawsuits have been filed by Rastafarians who say their dreadlocks were forcibly shaved by prison officials.
There is no question that Mr. Landor can sue for other kinds of relief besides money, like a declaration that the prison system’s grooming policy is unlawful and an injunction ordering prison officials not to shave his head again. But he has served his time, and that relief is useless to him.
“An injunction obviously would not help the then-bald Landor,” Judge Andrew S. Oldham wrote in dissent.
The only relief that matters, said Zack Tripp, a lawyer with Weil, Gotshal & Manges, which represents Mr. Landor, is money.
“Congress passed this law to prevent these sorts of abuses, and especially to protect members of minority faiths,” Mr. Tripp said. “The law requires prison officials to respect the religious practices of people who are incarcerated. But without damages, the law has no teeth. It is a right without a remedy, and prison officials can ignore it with impunity.”
Mr. Landor, for his part, said his dreadlocks are central to his identity and to his faith.
“My hair is my crown,” he said. “That’s why I hold my head up high. It’s awareness of being a young king.”
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