Supreme Court agrees to hear case of Rastafarian man seeking to sue prison officials for cutting his dreadlocks

The Supreme Court agreed Monday to take up the case of a Rastafarian man seeking to sue prison officials in Louisiana who cut off his dreadlocks while he was incarcerated.

The Supreme Court agreed Monday to take up the case of a Rastafarian man seeking to sue prison officials in Louisiana who cut off his dreadlocks while he was incarcerated. The case is the latest that involves religious rights to catch the high court’s attention, and it could have significant implications by allowing prisoners to sue government officials for damages when their religious rights are burdened under a federal law enacted 25 years ago. Damon Landor, a devout Rastafarian who began serving a five-month prison sentence in 2020 for drug possession, had taken a religious vow years earlier to not cut his locks. But his situation took a turn for the worst after arriving at a new prison weeks before his release. He handed officials a copy of an appeals court ruling from 2017 that allowed prisoners to have dreadlocks. The guards tossed it in the trash. They then handcuffed him to a chair and forcibly shaved his head. Following Landor’s release, he sued Louisiana prison officials and guards for damages under a decades-old law that protects the religious interests of inmates. But lower courts dismissed his case, ruling that the law doesn’t allow individuals to pursue damages against prison officials for alleged violations of it even though, in one court’s view, he had the victim of a “grave legal wrong.” The conservative New Orleans-based 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals said in a unanimous decision last year that it “emphatically” condemned “the treatment that Landor endured,” but an earlier appeals court precedent settled the case against him. The full 5th Circuit divided on whether to hear the case.