SCOTUS Refuses to Allow Damages Under RLUIPA for Rastafarian Former Prisoner Shaved Bald by Louisiana Prison Officials
by Chuck Sharman
The Supreme Court of the U.S. (SCOTUS) ruled against a former Louisiana prisoner on June 23, 2026, refusing to grant damages for his claim under the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUIPA) against state prison officials who shaved his dreadlocks, which he had maintained for decades in accordance with his Rastafarian religious beliefs.
The ruling was both surprising and not: surprising because the high Court has shown deference for other RLUIPA claims; unsurprising because the justices’ collective heart hardens when the government purse is threatened. In 2015, SCOTUS struck down a ban on short beards in the Arkansas Department of Corrections (DOC), as PLN reported, granting a Muslim prisoner’s RLUIPA claim; but four years earlier, the Court had also refused to grant a Texas prisoner money damages under the RLUIPA—even after state prison officials barred him from attending religious services while on cell restriction and also barred him from praying alone in the prison chapel. [See: PLN, Aug. 2015, p.50; and Aug. 2011, p.22.]
It was the latter of those decisions, Sossamon v. Texas, 563 U.S. 277 (2011), to which the current justices of SCOTUS returned when considering the appeal of the former prisoner, Damon Landor. As PLN also reported, he was subjected to blatant religious discrimination upon arrival at Louisiana’s Raymonde LaBorde Correctional Center in 2020, when guards insisted on cutting the knee-length dreadlocks he’d grown since adopting his Rastafarian religion nearly 20 years earlier. Landor carried with him at the time a copy of the opinion by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in Ware v. Louisiana, which ordered the state Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services (DPSCS) to let a Rastafarian prisoner keep his dreadlocks. [See: PLN, Apr. 2018, p.25.] Landor showed the opinion to the guard.
He threw it in the trash.
Summoned to the scene, Warden Marcus Myers demanded to see evidence that Landor was a practicing Rastafarian, such as a letter from his sentencing judge. When Landor could not provide written proof of his faith, Myers let him be handcuffed to a chair and shaved bald.
Landor then filed suit in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Louisiana, which dismissed the civil rights claims filed pursuant to 42 U.S.C. § 1983. Judge Shelly Dick reasoned that the DPSCS hair-trimming policy served a legitimate penological purpose which had already withstood a First Amendment challenge from Rastafarian prisoners in two cases at the Fifth Circuit, Scott v. Miss. Dep’t of Corr., 961 F.2d 77 (5th Cir. 1992), and Hicks v. Garner, 69 F.3d 22 (5th Cir. 1995). Landor’s RLUIPA claims were also dismissed because there were no damages available under the law, and any possible injunctive relief had been mooted by Landor’s intervening release from custody. The Fifth Circuit affirmed, and Landor appeal to SCOTUS, which issued a writ of certiorari to hear the case.
SCOTUS Majority Sticks
by Sossamon
Going back to its refusal 15 years earlier to extend damages under the RLUIPA in Sossamon, the Court made clear that it hadn’t changed its mind. Its reasoning ran like this: The Constitution’s separation of powers clause prevents the federal government from compelling a state to do anything, but when Congress exercises its powers under the constitution’s Spending Clause to disburse federal funds, it can tie them to a state’s compliance with a law like the RLUIPA.
In that case, the arrangement between Congress and a state is governed by contract, not by rights, Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote for the majority. In Landor’s case, as in Sossamon, the respective states accepted federal funds, which contractually bound them to abide by the RLUIPA. But the individual prison officials were not a party to that agreement and cannot be monetarily bound in the same way.
“Suits against nonconsenting parties like the individual officers here might advance RLUIPA’s policy but do not safeguard federal funds from being ‘frittered away in graft,’” the Court declared, quoting Sabri v. United States, 541 U.S. 600 (2004).
Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan joined in a dissent penned by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who called out the majority’s “peculiar”—meaning inconsistent—positions. It hadn’t “contest[ed] Congress’s power to impose RLUIPA’s substantive directive accommodating religious freedom,” yet it found “that Congress is powerless to create, and a State is powerless to accept, the natural next step: a damages remedy.”
“This severance of rights and remedies is a sleight of hand,” the Justice continued, one which “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.”
With the majority persuaded differently, the Fifth Circuit’s decision was affirmed. Before the Court, Landor was represented by attorney Zachary D. Tripp of Weil, Gotshal & Manges LLP in Washington, D.C. See: Landor v. La. Dep’t of Corr. & Pub. Safety, 2026 U.S. LEXIS 2717.
In a statement issued after the SCOTUS ruling, Landor said that “[w]hat happened to me violated my faith and my dignity,” promising also: “I will continue pursuing accountability.” But how, if the Court continues to deny money damages under the RLUIPA? One suggestion came from the Harvard Law Review after Landor lost at the Fifth Circuit: Make the RLUIPA enforceable with 42 U.S.C. § 1983, since “RLUIPA’s remedial scheme is compatible with § 1983 enforcement, and the text of the Act itself supports this conclusion.” See: “Landor v. Louisiana Department of Corrections & Public Safety, Fifth Circuit Bars Individual-Capacity Money Damages Under RLUIPA,” Harvard Law Review Vol. 137, Iss. 6 (Apr. 2024).
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