The lower court had ruled that dreadlock, who grew up on religious grounds, should be housed. However, the intake guard threw its control over the trash, handcuffing the prisoner to a chair and shaved him.
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WASHINGTON – The Supreme Court on June 23rd said it would decide whether prison officials will be sued for violating the inmate’s religious rights in a lawsuit involving Rastafarian, who was forced to shave by Louisiana’s prison guards.
Dreadlock, which Damon Landau had grown for nearly 20 years, was to be protected by a 2000 law relating to the religious rights of prisoners.
Landor had shown prison officials a copy of the court’s ruling that DreadLocks, who grew up on religious grounds, should be housed.
However, the ingestion guard throws control over the garbage, Landau is handcuffed to a chair, and the knee-length lock is forced to shaved.
The state denounces what happened to Landor “on the strongest possible conditions,” authorities wrote in their submission, highlighting that Louisiana’s Department of Corrections and Public Safety had amended their grooming policies to prevent repeated trials at Landor.
However, Louisiana argues that federal law does not allow Landor to hold corrections officers to hold Landor personally liable for breaking his dreadlock.
Otherwise, state lawyers wrote that there are “many unintended consequences,” including making prison and prison staff even more difficult.
Landor — the appeals were upheld by more than 30 religious groups and the Department of Justice — argues that it is often the only way to hold prison officials accountable when religious rights are violated.
“It’s often damages or nothing,” his lawyer said when he asked the Supreme Court to intervene.
The Justice Department agreed that the Supreme Court should take Landor cases because the issue is “unmistakably important” and “recurring at some degree of frequency.”
Federal law prohibits unnecessary religious restrictions
Many inmates trying to protect their rights will be released or transferred by the time their claims are heard – when it is rejected as no longer relevant, according to the religious groups that submitted a brief in favor of Landor.
“Prisons that are not burdened by the threat of damage have little incentive to protect prisoners from future abuse,” a lawyer for a group representing Christians, Muslims, Jews and Sikhs told the Supreme Court.
Landor was to be protected by religious land use and institutionalized persons’ laws, but was passed unanimously by Congress in 2000 to prevent state and local prisons from placing arbitrary or unnecessary restrictions on religious practices.
Twenty years after its enactment, the Justice Department said in its 2020 report that some agencies continue to impose substantial burdens without indicating that they are necessary.
Since the law was passed, the government has conducted dozens of investigations and filed or endorsed lawsuits against prisons and prisons.
Most claims have been raised by people who practice non-Christian religions, such as Jews, Muslims, Sikhs and Native Americans.
According to the Tayba Foundation, which supports imprisoned Muslims, nearly 30% of cases claiming violations in the first five years after the law came into effect have been brought about by Muslims.
“In prisons across the country, Muslims are targeted and taken away basic accommodation for their faith, including timely meals before and after religious fasting and the ability to pray without interference,” the group told the Supreme Court.
In 2020, the High Court held that a Muslim man who sought religious rights was violated by violating the government’s in-flight list after an FBI informant refused to sue FBI agents for damages.
The incident involved similar but different federal laws protecting religious expression.
A court of appeal judge who sympathized with Landor’s situation said it was not their role to say whether the Supreme Court’s 2020 ruling on federal employees should apply to state prison workers.
“Landor was clearly a serious legal error,” Justice Edith Brown Clement wrote in the opinion added by eight other judges at the New Orleans-based 5th Circuit Court of Appeals. “The question is whether damages therapy is available to him under Rluipa. That’s a question that only the Supreme Court can answer.”
