Supreme Court overturns Grants Pass homeless case, says city’s public camping rules aren’t ‘cruel and unusual’

The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday overturned lower court rulings, ruling that Grants Pass’s restrictions on public camping in southern Oregon did not constitute “cruel and unusual punishment.”

The court divided mainly along ideological lines with a 6-3 majority.

Justice Neil M. Gorsuch wrote for the majority that enforcement of laws regulating camping on public lands is “common” and not prohibited by the Eighth Amendment. He found that homelessness is “complex” and that limited city penalties for first-time offenders, trespassing in public parks for repeat offenders and a maximum of 30 days in jail for violators are penalties that do not add “terror, pain or shame.”

In a strongly worded dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote that sleep is a “biological necessity, not a crime,” and for those without access to shelter, city law penalizes them for their homeless status.

“This is unconstitutional and unjust,” she wrote, joining Justices Elena Kana and Ketanja Brown Jackson.

The court’s opinion was published just over two months after hearing the oral argument on 22 April.

The case is being touted as one of the most important homelessness cases to come to trial in decades and is being closely watched by state and city officials across the country as they grapple with the growing homelessness crisis. They expected the ruling could have significant resonance across the country.

The case arose when several homeless people filed a federal lawsuit against Grants Pass in 2018, alleging that the city’s aggressive enforcement of public camping and sleeping ordinances was intended to drive them out of the city. Police repeatedly told them to “stay put” and then issued tickets that ranged from fines starting at $295 to parking exclusions and then criminal charges. The ordinances prohibited people from using blankets, pillows and cardboard boxes to protect themselves from the elements while sleeping within city limits.

A federal district judge in Medford blocked the city from enforcing public camping regulations during the day without 24-hour notice and prevented it from enforcing the rules at night.

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals then sharply divided and upheld the district judge’s ruling, finding that Grants Pass’s set of ordinances criminalized homelessness, a violation of the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. The city then petitioned the Supreme Court to hear the case.

During more than two hours of heated discussion in late April, conservative justices questioned why federal judges should be involved in city policy decisions. They wondered why people affected by the Grants Pass camping ordinances could not raise a defense in state courts by claiming that their individual circumstances would not leave them elsewhere to sleep after being fined or charged with a crime, rather than seeking a preemptive broad ban on city ​​ordinances.

The liberal judges, in turn, violated the city’s law Theane D. Evangelis, who argued that homelessness is not a status and that the city does not punish people based on their status.

During arguments, Justice Elena Kagan called sleep a human necessity, adding, “It’s kind of like breathing.” She said she found the city’s position “quite striking” and “off-topic” and that the Eighth Amendment makes clear that it protects people from being punished based on their status, not their conduct.

The 9th Circuit’s rulings in Grants and the earlier Boise case were based on the constitutional principle of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1962 ruling in Robinson v. California, which held that the Eighth Amendment prohibits the government from punishing people based on their “condition or status.” In this case, the man could not be punished for drug addiction, but only for illegal drug use.

During the Supreme Court hearing, the justices appeared to struggle to figure out where to distinguish between a person’s status and his or her conduct when trying to determine what constitutes “cruel and unusual punishment” under the Eighth Amendment.

Assistant U.S. Attorney General Edwin S. Kneedler said the Grants Pass provisions go too far, calling them “the equivalent of exile” for people who have nowhere to sleep.

But he urged the court to reject the “involuntarily homeless” class certification in this case and instead require cities and law enforcement officials to make a case-by-case assessment of whether people actually have nowhere to stay before issuing any convictions, fines, or debarments. from parks or property rights arrests.

Sara K. Rankin, a professor at Seattle University School of Law and director of the Homeless Rights Project at the Korematsu Center, said she was surprised to hear some justices indicate during the oral argument that they might avoid ruling on the merits of the case. thing.

For example, Justice Ketjani Jackson asked lawyers in the case whether the Supreme Court should intervene, given that Oregon passed a new law in 2021 that allows “objectively reasonable” limits on how long, where and how people can sit, lie or sleep on outside.

Conservative judges questioned why people were subject to camping ordinances in Grants Pass cannot raise the defense in state courts that their individual circumstances have left them having nowhere else to sleep when they are fined or charged with a crime, rather than seeking a blanket ban on city ordinances. This is the so-called “necessity defense”, which states that the conduct in question could not have been avoided.

About a week before the opinion was released, Rankin said: “If the Supreme Court eliminates the availability of the truly modest Eighth Amendment protections for homeless people, it would send a powerful, hurtful and dehumanizing signal that will reverberate beyond the courts.”

Homeless advocates who have been eagerly awaiting the ruling said no opinion from the nation’s highest court will end homelessness. Housing and support services are needed, they argued.

On any given night, more than 256,000 people in the United States are homeless, and there is a shortage of 7.3 million affordable housing units, according to Ann Oliva, executive director of the National Alliance to End Homeless.

According to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, in 2022, approximately 17,000 people were left homeless every week for the first time in history.

Oliva called for long-term funding for safe and affordable housing and comprehensive services, and in the short term for support for housing construction, housing subsidies, safe parking spaces with behavioral support and other services, and low-barrier shelters.

William Knight, a former Arizona public defender who now serves as decriminalization director at the National Homelessness Law Center, said the 9th Circuit ruling in Grants Pass and Martin’s case in Boise never provided a “solution to the homeless problem” but instead provided an “emergency backstop” in case cities like Grants Pass “were making it worse, making it much worse, by criminalizing homelessness.”

Earlier this month, he said that no matter how the Supreme Court rules in the Grants Pass case, “it will not solve the homelessness problem that we face in this country because housing solves homelessness and that’s it.”

Helen Cruz, who was previously homeless in Grants Pass for about six years and who has racked up more than $2,000 in fines for sleeping in local parks, now lives in a church near the park, supporting other street dwellers in Southern Oregon. She said local residents were “nervous” as they awaited the Supreme Court ruling.

“People don’t seem to understand that they don’t want to be in parks,” she said.

People living in tents or sleeping in parks “want to have a place to live, you know, and we all have the right to that.”

Attorneys for the League of Oregon Cities, the city of Portland, and the Washington and Idaho Associations of Cities argued in a joint brief filed with the Supreme Court that the 9th Circuit has made an “extraordinary intrusion on local autonomy” and “made judges chancellors of city hall.”

The city of Portland is set to begin enforcing its relaxed homeless camping ban on Monday, nearly two months after the City Council unanimously approved a new law replacing the more stringent court-martialed measure. The new rules require people offered shelter to take it or face penalties, and order homeless people to keep their campgrounds in order if they can’t access shelter. The law reduces the potential 30-day jail stay for violators to just seven days and emphasizes a preference for offering offenders a reprieve.

This is a developing story; check back for updates.

— Maxine Bernstein covers federal courts and criminal justice. Contact her at 503-221-8212, [email protected], follow her on X @maxoregonianor on LinkedIn.

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