California homeless' right to camp in spotlight for Supreme Court
California homeless' right to camp in spotlight for Supreme Court
The Supreme Court is being urged to weigh whether homeless people have a constitutional right to sleep on public sidewalks and camp in parks.
Judge Marsha Berzon, a senior liberal on the appeals court, cited Supreme Court decisions from the early 1960s which said that drug addicts and alcoholics may not be punished simply because they have an addiction. She said the same principle applies to the homeless.
“Just as the state may not criminalize the state of being homeless in public places,” Berzon wrote, “the state may not criminalize conduct that is an unavoidable consequence of being homeless — namely sitting, lying or sleeping on the streets.”
Four years ago, a wide array of California business groups and cities, including Los Angeles, joined appeals that urged the Supreme Court to review that ruling in a case from Boise, Idaho.
To their surprise and dismay, however, the justices turned down the appeal without a comment or dissent. They may have done so because Boise officials had repealed part of a key ordinance after losing in a lower court. The appeal may have been seen as moot.
But the non-decision left the constitutional dispute untouched, and the issue is now back before the high court in a new appeal from a small city in southern Oregon.
Grants Pass has a population of about 38,000, of whom 50 or as many 600 are homeless. Shortly after the 9th Circuit’s ruling in 2018 case from Boise, lawyers sued on behalf of several homeless people in the city who said they were harassed by police and ticketed for sleeping in a park.
In response, a federal judge ruled the city cannot enforce a strict ban on camping in its public parks, and that ruling was affirmed by the 9th Circuit in a 2-1 decision.
Writing for the majority, Judge Roslyn Silver said she was obliged to follow the circuit court’s precedent in the Boise case, which held “the 8th Amendment prohibits the imposition of criminal penalties for sitting, sleeping, or lying outside on public property for homeless individuals who cannot obtain shelter.”
That in turn launched the new appeal to the Supreme Court.
Lawyers who worked on the case are optimistic the court will take it up because the homeless problem — and its impact on cities — has gotten much worse.
Their appeal filed late Tuesday argues that the 9th Circuit’s ruling and the federal judges who have applied it “have erected a judicial roadblock preventing a comprehensive response to the growth of public encampments in the West. The consequences of inaction are dire for those living both in and near encampments: crime, fires, the reemergence of medieval diseases, environmental harm, and record levels of drug overdoses and deaths on public streets....Only this [Supreme] Court can end this misguided project of federal courts dictating homelessness policy under the banner of the 8th Amendment.”
Last month, the 9th Circuit Court’s conservatives blasted their liberal colleagues for refusing to reconsider their past rulings on the rights of the homeless.
“Homelessness is presently the defining public health and safety crisis in the western United States. California, for example, is home to half of the individuals in the entire country who are without shelter on a given night,” wrote Judge Milan Smith in a dissent joined by eight others.
“In the City of Los Angeles alone, there are roughly 70,000 homeless persons. There are stretches of the city where one cannot help but think the government has shirked its most basic responsibilities under the social contract: providing public safety and ensuring that public spaces remain open to all,” Smith wrote. “One-time public spaces like parks — many of which provide scarce outdoor space in dense, working-class neighborhoods — are filled with thousands of tents and makeshift structures, and are no longer welcoming to the broader community.”
The 9th Circuit’s active judges split 14-13 over whether to re-hear the case from Grants Pass, just short of the needed majority. But such a broad divide on the nation’s largest U.S. appeals court often appears to trigger a review by the Supreme Court.
Under the court’s rules, the lawyers who represented the homeless plaintiffs have 30 days to file a response to the appeal in City of Grants Pass vs. Johnson. If that schedule holds, the justices could decide in late fall whether to hear the case and issue a ruling early next year. scotusblog.com/cases/city-of-boise-idaho-v-martin
Grants Pass has a population of about 38,000, of whom 50 or as many 600 are homeless.
Kind of a weird margin of error, but okay, homeless counts are hard.
There are stretches of the city where one cannot help but think the government has shirked its most basic responsibilities under the social contract: providing public safety and ensuring that public spaces remain open to all,” Smith wrote. “One-time public spaces like parks — many of which provide scarce outdoor space in dense, working-class neighborhoods — are filled with thousands of tents and makeshift structures, and are no longer welcoming to the broader community.”
"These parks must be open to everyone except the people who have nowhere else to sleep because all local homeless shelters are full" is about the speed I expect from LA.
Ffs let them live. If it's criminal for them to sleep anywhere what the fuck is a person supposed to do?
Yes they have a ton of homeless individuals and it really is becoming a problem that needs addressing. But other states bus their homeless to California. A state that COL is so high I cannot imagine how you can claw yourself out of that kind of poverty. America as a whole needs to be better. Do better. Stop making it all California's problem so you can turn around and point at the homeless problem as evidence of how shitty it's run. Spend your own damn tax dollars on social programs to help and rehabilitate addiction and treat mental illness.
Homelessness is a feature of capitalism, not a bug. To end it, we must abolish capitalism, anything else is a band aid on a cancer.
https://invisiblepeople.tv/capitalism-uses-homelessness-to-instill-fear/It is run pretty shitty, but I agree that it should be illegal for another state to dump their homeless on any other state.
California condones it though, why should everyone else support that decision?
Your parks and communal spaces are overrun and not safe for regular law-abiding citizens.
Other states bussed migrants not homeless. You voted for this so now bleeding heart your way out of it.
You voted for this so now bleeding heart your way out of it.
Gladly. Because ultimately I care about human beings and not some political tug of war. Maybe it would be easier for both sides to respect eachother and get along if we all at least had compassion for the most underprivileged humans. But alas, despite all of the church and Jesus's teachings preached and I am still disappointed time and again by conservatives only having compassion for the right kind of people. As long as it isn't an inconvenience to you right?
My god, just give them living spaces and resources to get them back to being able to just survive.
Housing is a right... Change my mind.
My god, just give them loving spaces
I concur, I've seem them doing this on the street and would much prefer they had their own private spaces for these activities.
Genuinely asking: what do the people trying to get this appeal think will happen if they win? I’m not seeing how this solves homelessness.
I don't think solving it is the intention.
The goal is to convince the homeless that living in Grants Pass will impoverish them worse than they already are so they need to leave (ideally, in the city elders' minds, to California). It does nothing to solve homelessness, it just makes it someone else's problem.
Why are they waving a flag. Proud of a country that treats them like shit
A. becoming homeless doesn't magically transform all of your views, which when you consider
B. the sheer indoctrination that Americans go through from infancy, it isn't surprising that many still blindly believe in the lies they were brainwashed with, no matter how damaging to them personally.It's a feature of the system - not only does it keep the workers blindly loyal, but you can also sow division by having an "other" opposed to you "nation" that is painted as a "threat" or a scapegoat, in order to divert attention from those actually making all the money and holding all the power.
I was wondering about that, too.
After 9/11, it seemed like everyone in American airports was wearing an American flag on their tee shirt, sweatshirt, jacket, or backpack. I think part of it was patriotism, but part of it was also an “I’m one of the good people” signal. A literal virtue signal that (they hoped) helped them move through TSA and made people be nicer to them. I mean a lot of people wore flags, but it was especially prominent at airports.
I’m wondering if this is the same kind of thing, analogous to getting those PBA stickers in your back window. I wonder if someone with a pride flag on their tent instead would be singled out for additional abuse.
It looks like they're just using them to patch their tents.
Uff
They may be military veterans. There are a lot on the streets, and in some places they congregate together for safety and support.
Can't wait for the current supreme court to get this one. Probably determine that camping in public spaces is not only illegal, but deserves the death penalty.