Three weeks remained on Damon Landor’s sentence. For three weeks. He was almost through it all. He had served his time for a drug-related offense, maintained his faith, and kept his dreadlocks, which were worn uncut as a Rastafarian vow of spiritual devotion. After that, everything drastically changed when he was moved to the Raymond Laborde Correctional Center in Louisiana.
Landor arrived with paperwork, worried that the new facility might not respect what the old one had. A 2017 court decision mandated that Louisiana’s Department of Corrections honor Rastafarian religious customs. He gave it to a guard at the intake. It was thrown in the trash by the guard.
What came next sounds almost too direct to be true. When Landor was unable to provide the documentation that a warden had demanded from his sentencing judge, two guards carried him into a different room, handcuffed him to a chair, restrained him, and shaved his head. Dreadlocks are not a fashion statement for Rastafarians. They are a representation of identity, devotion, and covenant. Landor subsequently stated, “When they cut off my hair, they cut off my crown.”
Last week, the US Supreme Court ruled 6-3 along conservative-liberal lines that Landor could not pursue monetary damages against the guards who committed this. Not because it wasn’t wrong what happened to him. Not because there was no infringement on his religious rights. However, due to a legal argument based on the Spending Clause of the Constitution, which basically states that federal laws pertaining to religious freedom that are passed by Congress serve as agreements between the federal government and the states, and that specific prison staff members never consented to be held accountable under such agreements.
In his majority opinion, Justice Neil Gorsuch presented it as a legal consent issue. The guards would have had to consent to the lawsuit in order for Landor to bring a personal lawsuit against them. The lawsuit is dismissed because they hadn’t, at least not officially. It’s a neat legal argument. It is also, depending on your point of view, either a mechanism that grants impunity to those most likely to abuse power over vulnerable people or a responsible interpretation of the constitution.
In her dissenting opinion, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson didn’t hold back. She charged that the majority was creating a sort of legal illusion by treating a congressional statute that safeguards the religious rights of prisoners as though it were only a bilateral contract rather than the law. She wrote, “Prisoners like Landor will frequently be left remediless.”” Remediless is an uncomfortable word. It implies that there is no legal way to hold people accountable for physically restraining a man and depriving him of a fundamental religious practice.
In an interview with NPR, Harvard law professor Noah Feldman brought up the broader implications. He said that prison guards are not the only government officials who can use this reasoning to avoid accountability. There’s a good chance that the logic will eventually apply to federal agents, ICE officials, and other people who work for organizations that receive federal funding. The majority may not have intended for the decision to go so far. However, legal principles tend to act independently.
The context of this case is particularly noteworthy. In cases involving Christian business owners, Catholic schools, and football coaches who pray on the field, the conservative supermajority that decided against Landor has consistently and vehemently supported religious liberty claims in recent years. The consistency has been observed. Then, in this instance, that same majority found a way to rule against a Black Rastafarian prisoner who had just a few weeks left on his sentence. It is not evidence of bad faith. However, it poses worthwhile questions.
For his part, Landor claims he’s not done. “I am disappointed but not defeated,” he stated via his legal counsel. “What happened to me should not happen to anyone else.” It is currently genuinely unclear if the courts will provide him or anyone in a similar situation with the means to stop it.
