Supreme Court to Hear Rastafarian Prisoner’s Suit Over Shaved Dreadlocks

The Supreme Court said on Monday that it would decide whether a Rastafarian man may sue prison guards in Louisiana who shaved off his dreadlocks in seeming violation of an appeals court’s ruling about how the state must treat members of his faith.

The case concerns Damon Landor, whose faith requires him to let his hair grow long. When he started a five-month prison term for drug possession in Louisiana in 2020, his dreadlocks fell nearly to his knees.

Mr. Landor was wary of the state’s prison system, according to a lawsuit he later filed, and he kept a copy of a 2017 judicial decision with him. That ruling, from a unanimous three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, said that Rastafarian inmates in Louisiana must be allowed to keep their dreadlocks under a 2000 federal law protecting prisoners’ religious freedom.

The first four months of Mr. Landor’s incarceration were uneventful. Then he was transferred to the Raymond Laborde Correctional Center in Cottonport, La. According to his lawsuit, he presented a copy of the 2017 decision to a guard, who threw it in the trash.

After consulting the warden, two guards handcuffed Mr. Landor to a chair, held him down and shaved his head to the scalp.

“When I was strapped down and shaved, it felt like I was raped,” Mr. Landor said in a statement last year. “And the guards, they just didn’t care. They will treat you any kind of way. They knew better than to cut my hair, but they did it anyway.”