The Supreme Court appeared unconvinced Monday {that a} devout Rastafarian whose dreadlocks have been forcibly minimize in prison 5 years in the past ought to have the opportunity to sue correction officials for damages.
Damon Landor had just 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 practically twenty years. Minutes earlier, Landor had handed them a judicial opinion requiring prisons to permit dreadlocks for spiritual functions.
On the one hand, the case appeared tailored for a conservative Supreme Court that has persistently sided with spiritual pursuits lately. But over the course of practically two hours of argument, it turned clear that the conservative wing is way extra involved with permitting folks to sue particular person state officials as a manner to enforce federal spending laws.
That’s largely as a result of, a number of justices prompt, these particular person state workers weren’t possible conscious of the agreements states had made in change for federal funding.
“Look, the facts of this case are egregious,” stated Justice Amy Coney Barrett, a member of the court docket’s conservative wing. But, she stated, “we can’t decide a case just based on these facts.”
Justice Neil Gorsuch, one other conservative who’s among the many court docket’s most ardent supporters of spiritual rights, prompt that beneath Landor’s idea, a cisgender lady attempting out for a sports activities crew on a school campus that receives federal funding might sue a coach personally for $1 million in damages for permitting a transgender lady onto that crew.
It was a notable query partly as a result of the court docket is predicted in coming weeks to hear arguments on whether or not states might ban transgender athletes from competing on groups in line with their gender id.
“As I understand it,” Gorsuch stated, the federal appeals courts “are unanimously against you and have been for many, many, many years.”
A panel of the fifth US Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Landor was not entitled to sue beneath a 25-year-old regulation supposed to shield prisoners’ spiritual pursuits.
The conservative New Orleans-based fifth Circuit stated that it “emphatically” condemned “the treatment that Landor endured,” however an earlier appeals court docket precedent settled the case against him. The full fifth Circuit in the end decided against rehearing the case.
Landor, who started serving a five-month prison sentence in 2020 for drug possession, had beforehand taken a promise often called the Nazarite vow to not minimize his hair.
He was incarcerated with out incident at two different amenities earlier than he was transferred to the Raymond Laborde Correctional Center with just a few weeks left in his sentence. And he got here armed with a duplicate of an appeals court docket ruling from 2017 that allowed prisoners to have dreadlocks.
Landor’s case on the Supreme Court rests on the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act, or RLUIPA. Congress handed that regulation, and one other that handled spiritual lodging extra extensively, in response to a landmark however controversial 1990 precedent from the court docket. Five years in the past, the justices ruled that the other law, which has practically an identical language, does permit folks whose spiritual rights have been burdened to search damages against authorities officials appearing of their particular person capability.
But Louisiana countered that RLUIPA is successfully a spending contract between the federal authorities, which gives funding for state prisons, and state officials. The particular person officials concerned in Landor’s pressured shaving weren’t a celebration to that contract, Louisiana stated, to allow them to’t be held personally liable.
Chief Justice John Roberts stated Landor’s argument that state workers had acquired discover rested on a “legal fiction.”
“I don’t think when the prison guard is hired, he says, ‘well, I want to see the federal conditions that you agreed to under the contract,’” Roberts stated.
The court docket’s three-justice liberal wing saved most of its hardest questions for Louisiana’s lawyer.
The court docket is probably going to hand down a call within the case subsequent yr.