In major decision, Supreme Court allows cities to ban homeless camps

WASHINGTON − The Supreme Court ruled Friday that people without homes can be arrested and fined for sleeping in public spaces, overturning a lower court’s ruling that enforcing camping bans when shelter is lacking is cruel and unusual punishment.

The 6-3 decision was the most significant ruling on the issue from the high court in decades.

It comes as record numbers of Americans lack permanent housing and as both Democratic and Republican leaders have complained a 2018 decision by a lower court has hamstrung their ability to address homeless encampments that threaten health and public safety.

“The Court cannot say that the punishments Grants Pass imposes here qualify as cruel and unusual,” Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote for the majority, referring to the small Oregon municipality at the center of the case.

“The city imposes only limited fines for first-time offenders, an order temporarily barring an individual from camping in a public park for repeat offenders, and a maximum sentence of 30 days in jail for those who later violate an order.”

Cruel and unusual punishment?

But Justice Sonia Sotomayor, writing for the court's liberal minority, said the laws essentially criminalized the act of sleeping.

“Sleep is a biological necessity, not a crime,” Sotomayor wrote in dissent, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson. “For some people, sleeping outside is their only option.”

Sotomayor noted that Grants Pass jails and fines people who sleep in public, such as in a car, or for using as little as a blanket to keep warm or a rolled-up shirt as a pillow. “For people with no access to shelter, that punishes them for being homeless,” she wrote. “That is unconscionable and unconstitutional.”

Ann Oliva, CEO of the National Alliance to End Homelessness, said the decision gives “free reign to local officials who prefer pointless and expensive arrests and imprisonment, rather than real solutions.”

“This tactic has consistently failed to reduce homelessness in the past,” Oliva said, “and it will assuredly fail to reduce homelessness in the future.”

`Urgent relief' to communities

Theane Evangelis, who represented Grants Pass, said the decision brought “urgent relief to the many communities that have struggled to address the growing problem of dangerous encampments.”

“For the past six years, the Ninth Circuit’s decisions have tied the hands of local governments,” Evangelis said.  “The Court has now restored the ability of cities on the frontlines of this crisis to develop lasting solutions that meet the needs of the most vulnerable members of their communities, while also keeping our public spaces safe and clean.”

The San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which oversees nine Western states, ruled in 2018 that banning camping in areas lacking sufficient shelter beds amounts to cruel and unusual punishment under the 8th Amendment.

The Supreme Court declined to weigh in at the time on that case from Boise, Idaho, but took up the issue this term after that precedent was used to challenge anti-camping rules in Grants Pass.

Homeless residents of the southern Oregon city of 38,000 had faced fines starting at $250 and leading to jail time for repeat offenses.

Criminalizing homelessness in a city without a homeless shelter

Advocates for homeless people said the rules amounted to criminalizing someone for having nowhere to live. The city lacks sufficient affordable housing. The one shelter for adults requires attending daily Christian services and other rules. Hundreds of residents are unhoused.

"We don't want to be in the parks," said Helen Cruz, a Grants Pass resident who lacks permanent shelter. "We want a place to live."

City officials said without the Supreme Court’s intervention, they would be forced to surrender their public spaces.

The Department of Justice had mostly backed the challengers while also arguing that the appeals court ruling was too broad and didn’t take into account individual circumstances such as whether someone had access to a shelter and refused it.

On any given night in the United States, more than 600,000 people are likely to be homeless, according to the federal government. Last year, 40% of homeless individuals slept under bridges, on sidewalks, in parks, cars, abandoned buildings and other public locations.

The case, which is the City of Grants Pass v. Johnson, attracted an unusually large number of briefs filed by outside interests.

Advocates for the homeless hoped that even if the decision didn't go their way, the case would spur elected officials at all levels of government to do more to address homelessness.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Supreme Court decision allows cities to ban homeless camps