Supreme Court Restricts Prisoner Religious Rights and Torture Suits

In a pair of decisions announced on June 23rd, the Supreme Court of the United States made it impossible for an individuals to sue the government for violating their right to religious expression while in prison and in situations regarding torture as it also protected Exxon’s right to sue over the Castro government nationalizing their property back in the 1960’s.

Damon Landor’s head was forcefully shaved by Louisiana state prison officials in December, 2020 despite the fact that he had informed them he was a devout Rastafarian and had been growing his hair out for over 20 years. The decision to forcefully shave his head was in violation of previous rulings by federal appeal courts that shaving the head of Rastafarian’s violated their rights under the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons act. He’d been allowed to have his hair under a rastacap throughout his sentence until his final transfer prior to his release.

The majority’s decision was written by associate justice Neil Gorsuch as he confirmed that the Louisiana state prison receives federal funds, and are subject to lawsuits for violating prisoners rights, the individual officials and officers at the prison are not; thus the officials and officers cannot be sued for their individual actions in violating Landor’s freedom of religious expressions. It was a 6-3 decision that was split along the conservative/liberal ideological lines.

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Associate justice Ketanji Brown Jackson absolutely hammered the conservative majority in her dissent, which was joined by Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.

[p]risoners like Landor who suffer violations of their religious freedom in state prisons—no matter how blatant—will often be left remediless. And encroachments on prisoners’ statutory rights are likely to happen with fair frequency, as state-empowered prison officials will have little incentive to abide by federal law, even if it is handed to them on a piece of paper.” – SCOTUS Blog

A majority decision written by associate justice Amy Coney Barrett saw the conservative majority on the Supreme Court gutted the ability of foreign citizens to sue the American government for torturing them or their family members. Barrett’s decision significantly narrowed the scope of lawsuits that can be filed based off the small number of claims Congress was probably thinking of when they wrote the 1789 Alien Tort Statute. This decision also disallowed lawsuits for aiding and abetting torture under the 1991 Torture Victim Protection Act.

The three liberal justices argued in the dissent written by Sotomayor that this decision basically closes the door on lawsuits against the people who have immigrated to the US to dodge consequences for their actions, while it also insulates the American government from lawsuits regarding its own actions.

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In another decision that was released on Tuesday, another 6-3 conservative/liberal decision decided that oil giant Exxon Mobil will be allowed to sue the Cuban government for assets that were nationalized in the early stages of Fidel Castro’s reign. Associate justice Brett Kavanuagh wrote that companies that want to sue the Cuban government are not required to find an exemption to the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act (FISA) thanks to the 1996 Helms-Burton Act – the Helms-Burton Act canceled the immunity that the Cuban government and its corporations normally had. Kavanaugh’s majority opinion makes the argument that any attempt to stack FISA on top of the Helms-Burton circumvents the Congressional design and it would impact the president’s foreign policy judgments.

Exxon’s accusation is that Cuba violated the Helms-Burton Act because it continued to extract, importing, and refining crude oil with equipment and infrastructure that was seized and nationalized after the Cuban Revolution. The district court and court of appeals all agreed that FISA generally bars lawsuits against companies owned by the Cuban government, SCOTUS disagreed.