The Supreme Court on Monday will hear oral arguments in a case where everyone already agrees a person’s rights were violated.
The case, Landor v. Louisiana, hinges on whether that person can seek monetary damages since they were in prison at the time of the violation.
In 2020, Damon Landor was serving a five-month prison sentence in Louisiana. Landor is a devout Rastafarian, who grew dreadlocks and did not cut his hair for nearly 20 years in accordance with his faith.
Just weeks before his term ended, he was transferred to a new prison. Guards at his first prison respected the religious practice of having long dreadlocks, but guards at the Raymond Laborde Correctional Center forcibly cut his hair by handcuffing him to a chair after he waived a physical document outlining the religious liberty law.
Landor’s case was dismissed by lower courts, leading him to appeal. In June, the Supreme Court agreed to hear his case this term.
Landor contends that the appeals court was wrong in its decision that he had no grounds to sue the prison for monetary damages.
Federal laws in the case
The case touches on two federal laws, both designed to protect religious liberties.
The Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) was passed by Congress in 1993 as a response to a Supreme Court decision in 1990 that made it easier for religious liberties to be violated by the government. RFRA requires there to be a compelling governmental interest and use the least restrictive means if someone’s religious expression rights were going to be violated.
A few years later, the Supreme Court determined Congress exceeded its authority in RFRA by applying it to state and local levels. As a result of the 1997 decision from the high court, RFRA could only be applied to federal actions.
Congress still wanted to design a law that would protect religious exercise at the state and local level. So, they wrote a narrower law, known as the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUIPA) in 2000.
RLUIPA focuses on two sources of federal power. The Spending Clause means Congress can put conditions on federal funds going to states, and the Commerce Clause allows Congress to regulate activities that impact interstate commerce.
How do RFRA and RLUIPA impact Landor?
Landor sued the prison employees for violating his rights under RLUIPA. The district court held that the law does not provide damages against individual state officials and the Fifth Circuit affirmed the decision, clearing the way for Landor to bring his case to the Supreme Court.
Under RLUIPA’s Spending Clause, Congress mandates that states follow the law and don’t violate inmates’ religious rights as a condition for accepting federal funding. When the state accepts federal funds, it’s essentially entering into an agreement that it won’t violate the law.
However, the lower courts decided that the state officials, or individual prison guards, are not the direct recipients of the federal funds, and could not be required to provide monetary damages under the Spending Clause. The agreement made was between federal and state governments, not the federal government and state employees, the courts ruled.
Now before the Supreme Court, Landor argues that the precedent from the 2020 case, Tanzin v. Tanvir, should apply. The case was brought by several Muslim men who were placed on the No Fly List by the FBI. They sued under RFRA, claiming their religious exercise was hindered by the federal government. The Supreme Court held that RFRA allowed the men to seek monetary damages.
Landor is arguing that he, too, should receive monetary damages because the statutory language used in the Tanzin decision and RFRA, is the same language used in RLUIPA. However, the relief available under RLUIPA is limited to injunctive or declaratory relief only, not monetary damages.
What can be expected during arguments and the decision?
Oral arguments in the case are on Monday, and will center on the language in each of the laws and the cases that came before Landor’s.
In its filing before the Supreme Court, Louisiana acknowledged Landor’s unfair treatment and strongly condemned what happened. The state also amended its “prison grooming policy to ensure that nothing” like what happened to Landor can happen again.
Experts predict that much of Monday’s arguments will be focused on the precedent set in the Tanzin decision, and tough questions will be asked of either side.
Daniel Chen, counsel at the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, authored the organization’s friend-of-the-court brief in support of Landor.
Chen said that Landor’s case presents a very narrow question for the justices to decide, but is “actually a pretty simple one.”
“Everyone agrees there is an egregious violation of Damon Landor’s rights. The Louisiana [attorney general] to its credit has said so and condemned the conduct at issue here,” he said. “But the legal question is whether there can be any mechanism to hold government officials accountable when they egregiously and purposefully violate an inmates’ religious freedom.”
Chen noted that in Landor’s case, he can’t seek injunctive relief from the state since he’s been released from prison. Receiving monetary damages are “essential” to RLUIPA’s protections because injunctive relief cannot be achieved in this instance, or other instances.
“Without the possibility of liability, prison officials can violate religious liberty in prisons without consequence,” he said.
While damages are what Landor is seeking and what oral arguments will focus on, Chen believes there’s a broader question the court will be deciding, which is “do people who are incarcerated have religious liberty rights if they are no longer in prison?” Additionally, Chen said, “do those rights have remedies?”
At Becket, and many other religious and non-religious organizations, and in the Trump administration, they believe the answer to those questions is yes.
One of those organizations is the Constitutional Accountability Center. Miriam Becker-Cohen, senior appellate counsel, a lead author on the center’s brief before the Supreme Court, argued that RLUIPA authorizes individual capacity damages and is in accordance with the Spending Clause.
Becker-Cohen believes that using a contract law analogy proves that Landor can receive damages from the prison guards. The federal government contracts with the state, which contracts with state employees and must comply with RLUIPA. If the employees don’t comply, they are “liable for individual capacity damages,” she said.
Becker-Cohen noted that damages are Landor’s only remedy in this case.
“If he isn’t allowed to pursue that remedy here, it really makes the free exercise promise of RLUIPA a hollow promise and undercuts the substantive value of that law and its effort to heighten the religious exercise right,” she said.
What is at stake in the case?
Zooming out, Becker-Cohen argued that what is at stake in Landor’s case is whether RLUIPA “really means anything.”
“Everyone agrees that these prison guards violated RLUIPA when they shaved his head, but a right without a remedy is pretty meaningless and without damages against these guards in this case, there’s no remedy,” she said.
“When you think about remedies for violations of rights as sort of the linchpin of whether that right has any meaning, it’s about much more than just the remedy, but about whether the right protected by the remedy has any sort of meaning or teeth to it,” Becker-Cohen continued.
Chen noted the difficulty of the case since it focuses on the rights of incarcerated individuals, who have been convicted of a previous crime. They’re not always viewed the most sympathetically, he said.
But, he said, “You’re more than the most terrible thing that you’ve done and you have rights. You have religious liberty rights, even when you’ve done that.”
“I think that RLUIPA was passed in the context of thinking about jails and prisons and incarceration, finding that even in those contexts, people don’t shed their constitutional rights.”