The Supreme Court ruled that a Louisiana prisoner whose dreadlocks were forcibly shaved off by prison guards cannot sue the guards under a f
Nina Tottenberg at NPR:
The Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that a Louisiana prisoner whose dreadlocks were forcibly shaved off by prison guards cannot sue the guards for money damages under a federal law enacted by Congress to protect the religious rights of prisoners. The vote was 6-to-3, with the court's conservative supermajority prevailing. There is little dispute about the facts of the case. Damon Landor, a Rastafarian, had only three weeks left on his sentence when he was transferred to a prison in Louisiana. Although the previous prison where he was housed honored his religious vow of keeping his hair uncut, he was worried that the new prison might not, so he carried with him a copy of a 2017 court decision that required the Louisiana Department of Corrections to honor Rastafarian religious practices. Upon arrival, Landor showed his papers to an intake guard, but the guard threw them in the trash. The guard then summoned the warden, who demanded paperwork from Landor's sentencing judge documenting his religious beliefs. When Landor couldn't do that on the spot, two guards carried him into another room, handcuffed him to a chair, and held him down while they shaved his head.
After his release from prison, Landor sued the individual prison guards for money damages under a federal law enacted by Congress to protect the religious rights of prisoners. But the court's conservative majority ruled that the law does not permit him to sue the individual guards who violated his constitutional rights. The decision focused on the Spending Clause of the Constitution, which grants Congress the power to give money to the states for particular purposes and to attach conditions to such monetary grants.
But as Justice Neil Gorsuch put it in his opinion for the six-justice court majority, laws passed under the Spending Clause are essentially "contracts" between the state and the federal government. When a state accepts federal money, it knows and accepts the conditions of the money, and if it violates the terms of the contract, the federal government can cease payments.
[...] For the court's conservatives, Tuesday's decision was a fairly dramatic departure from their other decisions on religious matters, cases in which the conservatives have repeatedly sided with those claiming that their religious rights were violated. In a sizzling dissent for the court's three liberals, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson castigated the majority for diminishing not just individual religious rights, but the power of Congress to legislate. She accused the majority of constructing a "sleight of hand" that "comes by way of the majority's full-throated endorsement of a contract analogy even though what secures the rights at issue is not a contract, but a law."
The out-of-touch radical right-wing SCOTUS ruled 6-3 in Landor v. Louisiana Department of Corrections to not allow Damon Landor to sue the guards who violated his religious freedom by cutting off his dreadlocks.
In short: religious freedom for Christian conservatives is A-OK with the radical right-wing MAGA 6 majority, but religious freedom for other faiths is met with “unh-unh.”
See Also:
SCOTUSBlog: Court rules former Louisiana inmate cannot sue prison officials in religious dispute over long hair
