An Oregon city is urging the Supreme Court to reverse a lower court ruling that prevents it from prosecuting homeless people for sleeping outside.
Oral arguments in the case, City of Grants Pass v. Johnson, will be heard on April 22. Grants Pass, with a population of 39,000, is located in southwest Oregon on the California border. Activist Gloria Johnson is the lead respondent.
The case comes as cities across the nation struggle with homelessness and homeless camping sites, which have been growing because of rising residential rents, among other factors. More than 580,000 people experienced homelessness in 2022, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development has reported.
In the case at hand, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit held that Grants Pass was barred by the U.S. Constitution from enforcing criminal or civil penalties as part of an effort to enforce the municipality’s laws against camping on public lands.
The Ninth Circuit affirmed the July 2020 ruling of U.S. Magistrate Judge Mark D. Clarke of the U.S. District Court in Oregon, who found that Grants Pass’ “policy and practice of punishing homelessness violated the Cruel and Unusual Punishment Clause of the Eighth Amendment.”
Judge Clarke held that Martin v. Boise, a Ninth Circuit decision from 2019, was a controlling precedent in the case. That ruling held the Constitution “prohibits punishing people for engaging in unavoidable human acts, such as sleeping or resting outside when they have no access to shelter,” the judge wrote.
In Martin, the circuit court found that “‘so long as there is a greater number of homeless individuals in [a city] than the number of available beds [in shelters],’ a city cannot punish homeless individuals for ‘involuntarily sitting, lying, and sleeping in public.’”
To “criminalize indigent, homeless people for sleeping outdoors” would be to punish them based “on the false premise they had a choice in the matter.”
The Martin ruling was based in part on the Supreme Court ruling in Robinson v. California (1962), which held that states may not punish a person for a mere status or condition, such as a medical condition.
“Even one day in prison would be a cruel and unusual punishment for the ‘crime’ of having a common cold,” the late Justice Potter Stewart wrote.
The Ninth Circuit’s ruling upholding the district court’s decision is an example of “result-oriented jurisprudence at its worst, proof that an intellectually dishonest judge can reach any result he or she wants just by writing grammatically correct sentences and sprinkling in a few citations to, or quotations from, Supreme Court decisions,” according to Paul J. Larkin and Zack Smith of the conservative Heritage Foundation.
Instead, the respondents are arguing that Robinson “categorically prohibit[s]” any punishment of status-linked conduct, and their argument must fail because Robinson is the Supreme Court’s “only Eighth Amendment decision addressing not a punishment’s mode or severity, but what can be made a crime in the first place.”
The respondents’ approach “would undermine settled doctrine, require courts to micromanage homelessness policy across the country, and upend traditional principles of criminal responsibility,” the brief states.
Over the last five years, the Martin ruling has hamstrung public officials in their effort to deal with homelessness and burdened federal judges with having to make hard decisions on complex policy issues, according to the brief. The decision has caused chaos as it “spawned sweeping injunctions, endless litigation, and public encampments throughout the Ninth Circuit.”
More importantly, the Eighth Amendment “has nothing to say” about the debate over government housing policy and efforts “to keep public spaces open, safe, and clean for the general public,” the brief states.
U.S. Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar filed a motion on April 1 asking the justices to allow the federal government, which is not a party to the appeal, for permission to participate in the oral argument on April 22 as a so-called friend of the court. The filing of the motion indicated the government believed the case was important.
The United States argued in a brief that the Ninth Circuit correctly held that the Eighth Amendment as interpreted in Robinson v. California forbids “a local government from effectively criminalizing the status of homelessness by completely barring individuals without access to shelter from residing in the jurisdiction.”
“Punishing poverty traps people in cycles of debt, unemployment, and hopelessness, increasing the likelihood someone will become chronically homeless, which makes the problem worse for everyone and therefore serves no legitimate penological purpose,” the brief states.
Studies have also demonstrated that “punishing homelessness” is ineffective, the brief states.
