Headline Roundup • June 24th, 2026
Supreme Court Rules Prison Guards Cannot Be Sued for Violating Religious Rights
Summary from the AllSides News Team
A Rastafarian man who was a prisoner in Louisiana cannot sue the prison guards who violated his religious rights by shaving his dreadlocks, the Supreme Court ruled on Tuesday.
The Details: Three weeks before the end of his sentence, Damon Landor was transferred to a prison in Louisiana, where prison guards handcuffed him to a chair and forcibly shaved off his dreadlocks. Landor had shown the guards a copy of a 2017 court ruling requiring the Louisiana Department of Corrections to honor Rastafarian religious practices, including the belief that dreadlocks and hair are a sacred expression of faith and should not be cut; however, guards took the paper and threw it out before shaving him.
The Court's Ruling: The Court ruled that Landor cannot sue the individual prison guards and that the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act, which Landor used as grounds to pursue monetary payments for damages, applies to prisons that receive federal funding, not individuals that work for it. Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote, "Under the Spending Clause, Congress lacks regulatory authority to impose liability on them directly and must depend instead on consent." In the words of NPR (Lean Left bias), this means that "the prison guards who shaved Landor's head would need to have agreed to be sued in order for Landor's suit to proceed." BBC (Center) compared Landor's case to a 2020 ruling that allowed individuals to sue federal officials for religious liberty violations, noting that in Landor's case, "Louisiana argued that RLUIPA should be treated differently because it governs state institutions."
Dissenting Opinions: The National Desk (Right) included Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson's dissent, where she said that "the ruling weakens enforcement of prisoners' religious rights and leaves officials with less incentive to follow the law." NPR noted that the decision "was a fairly dramatic departure from their other decisions on religious matters, cases in which the conservatives have repeatedly sided with those claiming that their religious rights were violated," implying a potential difference in treatment due to his Rastafarian faith.
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Featured Coverage of this Story
The Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that a Louisiana prisoner whose dreadlocks were forcibly shaved off by prison guards cannot sue the guards for money damages under a federal law enacted by Congress to protect the religious rights of prisoners. The vote was 6-to-3, with the court's conservative supermajority prevailing.
There is little dispute about the facts of the case. Damon Landor, a Rastafarian, had only three weeks left on his sentence when he was transferred to a prison in Louisiana. Although the previous prison where he was housed honored his...
The Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that a former Louisiana inmate cannot seek money damages from prison officers who forcibly cut his dreadlocks, which he says violated his Rastafari faith.
In a 6-3 decision, the justices held that the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUIPA) does not allow lawsuits seeking damages against individual prison employees.
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The US Supreme Court has ruled that a former Louisiana inmate cannot sue prison officials who forcibly shaved his dreadlocks in violation of his Rastafarian faith.
In a 6-3 ruling, the top court said the prisoner, Damon Landor, was not entitled to monetary damages under a federal religious freedom law as it did not apply to individual officials.
