The U.S. Supreme Court ruled June 23 that inmates cannot seek damages if their religious rights have been abused or denied by prison officials.
The 6-3 decision along ideological lines came in the case of Damon Landor, a Rastafarian whose hair was forcibly shaved by Louisiana prison guards in 2020 despite showing them a federal court ruling upholding his religious right to keep his dreads while incarcerated.
Damon Landor with dreadlocks
Rastafarians wear dreadlocks as an expression of faith. Landor had maintained his knee-length dreads for nearly 20 years when he began serving a five-month sentence for drug possession.
“Prisoners like Landor who suffer violations of their religious freedom in state prisons — no matter how blatant — will often be left remediless,” Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote in a dissent joined by justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan. “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.”
At issue in Landor v. Louisiana Department of Corrections was whether a provision in the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act, or RLUIPA, enables victims of religious discrimination to seek monetary damages from governments and government employees in addition to the injunctive or declaratory relief specified by the law.
Lower courts, including the U.S. Fifth District Court of Appeals, ruled Landor could not seek money from the corrections department or from the guards and officials who were named as defendants in the lawsuit.
The high court upheld those rulings because RLUIPA does not grant authority to spend federal tax dollars for legal damages, Justice Neil Gorsuch said in his opinion for the majority.
The only remedy in this case would be for Congress to freeze or rescind federal funds it allotted to the Louisiana Department of Corrections for the violation of Landor’s religious freedoms. But the department previously was dismissed from the action.
“LDOC does not dispute that it is a recipient of federal funds. It does not question that it has agreed to answer certain RLUIPA suits as a condition of accepting those funds. But as it comes to us, this case does not involve claims against LDOC. It involves only claims against individuals in their personal capacities.”
But individuals are off the hook, too, because they did not “voluntarily and knowingly” undertake to meet the state’s federal obligations under the law, Gorsuch said.
“Because that essential element is missing here, we affirm the judgment of the Fifth Circuit,” Gorsuch wrote. “Congress lacks regulatory authority to impose liability on them directly and must depend instead on consent. And because they never agreed to answer suits like this one, Mr. Landor’s case cannot proceed against them any more than a breach of contract action might proceed against a defendant who never formed a contract.”
Rachel Laser
Americans United for Separation of Church and State echoed Jackson’s concerns about the repercussions of the high-court decision, describing it as a product of the Supreme Court’s Christian nationalist leanings.
“Today’s U.S. Supreme Court decision endangers the religious freedom of incarcerated people, like Damon Landor, who are particularly vulnerable to abuse and having unnecessary burdens placed on their religious exercise,” AU President Rachel Laser said.
“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. We can only hope this faulty decision doesn’t embolden more prison officials to ignore the religious-freedom rights of incarcerated people to observe their faith as long as they don’t harm others.”
Holly Hollman
Holly Hollman, chief legal officer of Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, also questioned the ruling.
“We are disappointed in the court’s decision, which narrows the relief available when prisons violate the religious freedom of those in their custody. Congress passed the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act in 2000 on a simple premise: Religious freedom is for everyone. States and local governments accept federal money to run their prisons on the condition that they respect the religious rights of the people held there.
“Both the lower court and the Supreme Court acknowledged that officials grossly violated Mr. Landor’s rights. Yet today the court held that the statute’s promise of ‘appropriate relief against a government’ does not allow money damages against the individual officers responsible — weakening prisoners’ ability to seek justice and to deter future violations.
“BJC and our coalition partners will continue to defend RLUIPA and the religious freedom it guarantees for everyone.”
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