The Supreme Court said on Tuesday that a Rastafarian whose dreadlocks were forcibly shaved by prison guards could not sue state officials for money.
In a 6-to-3 vote dividing the court along ideological lines, the majority said federal law did not allow the prisoner, Damon Landor, to sue individual officers in their private capacity for violating his religious beliefs.
Justice Neil M. Gorsuch wrote the majority opinion. The three liberal justices dissented.
The decision was a departure from a series of Supreme Court rulings in recent years that have repeatedly bolstered religious rights. In 2022, the court sided with a Texas death row inmate who wanted his pastor to touch him and pray aloud at the time of his execution. That same year, the court said a high school football coach had a constitutional right to pray at the 50-yard line after his team’s games.
The Trump administration and lawyers for the former inmate, Mr. Landor, had urged the Supreme Court to allow his lawsuit to proceed.
When Mr. Landor reported for a five-month sentence for drug possession in Louisiana, he had not cut his hair for almost two decades, in keeping with his faith. His dreadlocks fell nearly to his knees.
Four months into his term, in 2020, he was transferred to a new prison. He carried with him a copy of a 2017 legal opinion that held that inmates must be allowed to keep their dreadlocks under a federal law protecting prisoners’ religious freedom.
When he pulled out a copy of that decision, a guard threw it in the trash, according to court documents he filed in a later lawsuit.
Two guards then handcuffed Mr. Landor to a chair and forcibly shaved him bald.
He sued the warden and the guards under the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act, a federal law that requires states to protect the religious rights of individuals in state institutions.
In a separate case, the Supreme Court ruled in 2020 that a related statute from 1993 — the Religious Freedom Restoration Act — permitted individuals to sue to “obtain money damages against federal officials in their individual capacities.”
The question for the justices was whether the language in the two statutes should be read the same way to allow people to get money as appropriate relief from the government when their rights have been violated.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, the same court that had ruled that the law protected Rastafarian prisoners’ dreadlocks, said it “emphatically” condemned Mr. Landor’s treatment. But the judges said they were bound by past precedent that did not allow such litigation against state officials. The statute Mr. Landor relied on was meaningfully different, the panel wrote, and did not authorize his suit.
The full Fifth Circuit declined to rehear the case, but nine judges asked the Supreme Court to provide direction to the lower courts.
