June 23 (UPI) -- The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday took on a new religious case regarding a former Louisiana inmate of Rastafarian belief whose dreadlocks were forcibly cut off by prison officials, but only after after a lower court "emphatically" condemned the ex-inmate's treatment as he seeks financial relief.
Damon Landor served all but three weeks of a five-month jail sentence in 2020 on a drug-related criminal conviction when he was transferred to Raymond Laborde Correction Center in Avoyelles Parish roughly 30 miles south of Alexandria in east-central Louisiana.
He took with him a copy of a 2017 decision by the state's 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals saying Louisiana's policy of cutting the hair of Rastafarians violated the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act, and Landor then showed the intake guard.
The federal act forbids regulations that impose a "substantial burden" on the religious exercise of jailed persons, but a prison official rebuffed his concern.
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