The most horrifying religion case to hit the Supreme Court in years is also one of the hardest |
Damon Landor suffered one of the most blatant and obvious violations of his religious liberty imaginable.
Landor is Rastafarian and, as part of his religious devotion, does not cut his hair. According to his lawyers, he kept this vow for more than two decades, and his hair grew long enough to fall “nearly to his knees.” Then, while he was serving a five-month prison sentence for a drug-related crime in 2020, prison officials handcuffed him to a chair, held him down, and shaved his head.
The most remarkable thing about Landor’s case is, when Landor was transferred to the prison facility where he was shaved, he brought with him a copy of a federal appeals court’s decision in Ware v. Louisiana Department of Corrections (2017), which held that Louisiana’s policy of cutting the hair of Rastafarian prisoners violates a federal religious liberty law. Yet, despite the fact that Landor showed this decision to prison officials, they shaved his head anyway.
Given these facts, it sure seems like Landor v. Louisiana Department of Corrections should be a slam-dunk case for the plaintiff. At the time that he was shaved, there was a federal court decision clearly establishing that Louisiana may not shave Rastafarian inmates who share Landor’s belief that they should grow their hair long. And the prison officials who shaved him were clearly aware of that decision because Landor brought a copy of the case with him to prison.
But his case, sadly, is far more complicated than it should be, for two reasons. One is that Landor is suing several of the prison officials responsible for shaving him, including the prison warden and several guards — claiming that they personally owe him for violating his legal rights. This Supreme Court is often hostile to plaintiffs who seek money damages from individual law enforcement officers, although a 2020 Supreme Court decision suggests that they are less so in cases involving religious liberty.
The other needless difficulty of Landor’s case stems from a fight over judicial supremacy that consumed pretty much the entire 1990s. In Employment Division v. Smith (1990), the Supreme Court drastically limited the scope of the Constitution’s provision protecting the free exercise of religion. Congress then enacted a law seeking to undo Smith, but the Supreme Court nullified much of that law in City of Boerne v. Flores (1997).
Landor sued prison officials under the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act of 2000 (RLUIPA), which sought to restore some of the religious liberties denied by the Court in City of Boerne. The........