Damon Landor had only a few weeks left on his Louisiana drug sentence when guards at Raymond Laborde Correctional Center handcuffed him to a chair and shaved off the knee-length dreadlocks he'd spent nearly two decades growing. Minutes before it happened, he handed the guards a judicial opinion showing they were legally required to allow his dreadlocks for religious reasons. They threw it in the trash, CNN reports.

For a devout Rastafarian like Landor, his locs aren't just hair — they're a sacred commitment, a religious practice tied to spiritual devotion. What followed that day in 2020 became the basis of a years-long legal fight that landed at the nation's highest court. On Tuesday, he lost, according to NBC.

The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that Landor cannot seek damages under the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act, known as RLUIPA, with conservatives in the majority and liberals dissenting. Writing for the majority, Justice Neil Gorsuch reasoned that the law did not allow individual prison officials to be held personally liable since they were not technically part of the financial arrangement between the federal government and the state. 

However, no one in the case disputed that Landor's rights were violated. Louisiana even acknowledged the mistreatment and said the prison system has since updated its grooming policy. But the court's conservative bloc drew a firm line around who can actually be sued under federal religious protections. 

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, joined by justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan in dissent, warned that prisoners who suffer violations of their religious freedom in state prisons "will often be left remediless." The ACLU called the ruling "a devastating blow to the religious freedom and dignity of incarcerated people." 

Landor, through his lawyers, said he remains committed to the fight: "I am disappointed but not defeated. What happened to me violated my faith and my dignity. I will continue pursuing accountability."