The Supreme Court on Friday overturned two decisions from the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals that granted significant protections to homeless people from punishment for sleeping outdoors.
The decision in Grants Pass v. Johnson will make it easier for states and cities to ban homeless people from sleeping outdoors with as little as a blanket while punishing them with civil fines and criminal sanctions, including jail time. Homeless advocates believe the decision could lead to new anti-homeless laws that effectively force homeless people out of the states and cities in which they live without offering them alternatives.
The case came out of Grants Pass, Oregon, a small city with a population of about 40,000, where three homeless people — Gloria Johnson, John Logan and Debra Blake, who has since died — challenged city ordinances enacted in 2013 that were aimed at removing the homeless population from the city. The ordinances, billed as an anti-camping restriction, prohibited people from sleeping outdoors with even a blanket. The plaintiffs argued that the law was being enforced against a distinct category of individuals, homeless people, who have no other alternatives about where to sleep.
Their challenge was based on a 2018 decision by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in Martin v. Boise that blocked the Idaho city from banning all outdoor sleeping as a form of cruel and unusual punishment under the Constitution’s Eighth Amendment. Ninth Circuit courts then extended Martin to block numerous state and city schemes aimed at limiting outdoor sleeping and camping by homeless people. In Grants Pass, the 9th Circuit ruled that Martin prevented the city from issuing escalatory civil fines to homeless people for sleeping outside with as little as a blanket.
The Supreme Court, however, overturned these decisions, arguing that the Eighth Amendment’s protection against cruel and unusual punishment should not be extended to cover laws limiting outdoor sleeping by homeless people.
In a 6-3 decision authored by Justice Neil Gorsuch, the court ruled that “generally applicable” laws like those against camping could not qualify as cruel and unusual punishment.
“Grants Pass’s public-camping ordinances do not criminalize status. The public-camping laws prohibit actions undertaken by any person, regardless of status. It makes no difference whether the charged defendant is currently a person experiencing homelessness, a backpacker on vacation, or a student who abandons his dorm room to camp out in protest on the lawn of a municipal building,” the decision read.
Justices Samuel Alito, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett joined the opinion, as did Chief Justice John Roberts, with Justice Clarence Thomas writing a concurring opinion.
In overturning Martin and Grants Pass, the Supreme Court found that homeless people do not constitute a class with an immutable status that confers protections from cruel and unusual punishment. In Martin, the 9th Circuit had relied on the Supreme Court’s 1962 decision in Robinson v. California that found California’s ban on being a drug addict as cruel and unusual punishment, as it amounted to a status-based punishment that made it impossible to exist legally as a person in the state.
However, the Supreme Court said the situation in Grants Pass was not comparable.
“Public camping ordinances like those before us are nothing like the law at issue in Robinson,” Gorsuch wrote. “Rather than criminalize mere status, Grants Pass forbids actions like ‘occupy[ing] a campsite’ on public property ‘for the purpose of maintaining a temporary place to live.’”
A broad collection of states and cities, including Democratic-run California and Republican-run Idaho, had weighed in with briefs in the case to argue for the court to either overturn the 9th Circuit’s decisions in Martin and Grants Pass or limit them. The Department of Justice argued before the court that Martin should be limited to uphold some Eighth Amendment protections for the homeless while still allowing municipalities to police outdoor sleeping more strictly than the 9th Circuit’s precedents allowed.
Now, states and cities may police homeless people with much greater latitude, including banning almost all sleeping outside. Advocates argue that homeless people may now be left with nowhere to sleep or live in the communities in which they reside. If cities and states implement schemes like Grants Pass that are aimed at removing homeless people from their boundaries entirely, homeless people may have no place to go and be effectively banned from existence.
In a scathing dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor addressed the predicament that many homeless individuals will be faced with.
“Sleep is a biological necessity, not a crime,” Sotomayor wrote in an opinion joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson. “For some people, sleeping outside is their only option.”
The dissent acknowledged that cities and states have an interest in maintaining public health and safety, but criticized the majority for prioritizing those interests at the expense of homeless individuals.
“It is possible to acknowledge and balance the issues facing local governments, the humanity and dignity of homeless people, and our constitutional principles,” Sotomayor wrote. “Instead, the majority focuses almost exclusively on the needs of local governments and leaves the most vulnerable in our society with an impossible choice: Either stay awake or be arrested.”
