The U.S. Supreme Court ruled Friday that an Oregon city’s ban on homeless encampments can stand, as it does not violate the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against “cruel and unusual punishment.”
In determining this, the Court looked not only at the permissibility of the punishments imposed upon those who violate the ordinance, but also at the constitutionality of the ban itself.
According to the 6-3 majority, the ban adopted by Grants Pass, Oregon does not represent an Eighth Amendment violation as it does not criminalize public camping on the basis of “status,” a threshold that was established by the Court in 1962.
Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented from the majority, collectively arguing that the ordinance does punish homeless individuals for their status as a homeless person because “sleep is a biological necessity, not a crime.”
The case of Grants Pass v. Johnson turned on the question of whether or not the Oregon city’s prohibition against sleeping with a blanket in public spaces violated of the Eighth Amendment’s protection from “cruel and unusual punishment.”
More specifically, the Justices were tasked with answering the question: “Does enforcement of generally enforceable laws regulating camping on public property constitute ‘cruel and unusual punishment’ prohibited by the Eighth Amendment?”
During oral arguments held earlier this year, it became apparent that conversations regarding whether or not the Grants Pass ordinance criminalized homelessness as a status would play a crucial role in determining the outcome of this case.
Frequently discussed was the Court’s 1962 ruling in the case of Robinson v. California in which the Justices determined it was unconstitutional to criminalize the status of drug addiction.
While this ruling did not prohibit the enforcement of laws against the conduct associated with being addicted to drugs — such as the possession of illicit substances — it did block the criminalization of drug addiction as a status in and of itself.
While the attorney for Grants Pass argued that the city’s law contained no language criminalizing homelessness as a status, the plaintiff’s lawyer contended that because sleeping is a “human necessity” and having nowhere to sleep is intrinsic to the definition of being homeless, the city’s law as written effectively criminalizes the status of homelessness.
[RELATED: Municipal Bans on Homeless Encampments Under Consideration by SCOTUS]
This same point of disagreement emerged between the Supreme Court Justices in their opinions Friday.
The majority opinion — authored by Justice Neil Gorsuch and joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett — agreed with the interpretations presented by Grants Pass.
“Grants Pass’s public-camping ordinances do not criminalize status,” the majority opinion stated. “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 Justices stated.
The majority went on to explain that while there are many constitutional provisions that dictate what can and cannot be criminalized, “the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against ‘cruel and unusual punishments’ focuses on what happens next.”
These Justices also discuss the difficulties and impracticalities associated with any attempt by the Court to establish a test of involuntariness or unavailability with respect to bans on sleeping in public.
“Answers to questions such as what constitutes ‘involuntarily’ homelessness or when a shelter is ‘practically available’ cannot be found in the Cruel and Unusual Punishments Clause,” the Justices wrote. “Nor do federal judges enjoy any special competence to provide them.”
“A handful of federal judges cannot begin to ‘match’ the collective wisdom the American people possess in deciding ‘how best to handle’ a pressing social question like homelessness,” the Court said. “The Constitution’s Eighth Amendment serves many important functions, but it does not authorize federal judges to wrest those rights and responsibilities from the American people and in their place dictate this Nation’s homelessness policy.”
“Yes, people will disagree over which policy responses are best; they may experiment with one set of approaches only to find later another set works better; they may find certain responses more appropriate for some communities than others,” the Justices wrote. “But in our democracy, that is their right.”
The Court goes on to explain that the Eighth Amendment is not the only potential avenue by which enforcement of these laws may be challenged down the road.
“Many substantive legal protections and provisions of the Constitution may have important roles to play when States and cities seek to enforce their laws against the homeless,” the Justices said. “The only question we face is whether one specific provision of the Constitution—the Cruel and Unusual Punishments Clause of the Eighth Amendment—prohibits the enforcement of public-camping laws.”
Justice Clarence Thomas’ Concurring Opinion
Justice Thomas explains in his concurring opinion that agrees with the majority’s ruling in full and writes separately to make additional remarks concerning the claims advanced in this case.
In this opinion, Thomas criticizes Robinson, as well as many “of the Court’s other Eighth Amendment precedents,” for relying “almost entirely on the Court’s understanding of public opinion.”
Although he clarifies that Robinson does not need to be reconsidered in order to resolve this case, he takes the opportunity to argue that “rather than let[ting] Robinson’s erroneous holding linger in the background of our Eighth Amendment jurisprudence, we should dispose of it once and for all.”
Thomas then suggests that the respondents in this case may not have truly even implicated the Cruel and Unusual Punishments clause of the Eighth Amendment in their complaint, as the ordinance is typically enforced through civil fines and orders.
“The challenged ordinances are enforced through the imposition of civil fines and civil park exclusion orders, as well as through criminal trespass charges. But, ‘[a]t the time the Eighth Amendment was ratified, the word punishment referred to the penalty imposed for the commission of a crime,'” Thomas said.
“The respondents have yet to explain how the civil fines and park exclusion orders constitute a ‘penalty imposed for the commission of a crime,'” he continued. “If this case is any indication, the possibility that a civil fine turns into a criminal trespass charge is a remote one. The respondents assert that they have been involuntarily homeless in Grants Pass for years, yet they have never received a park exclusion order, much less a criminal trespass charge.”
“Both this Court and lower courts should be wary of expanding the Clause beyond its text and original meaning,” Thomas concluded.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s Dissenting Opinion
The dissenting opinion, authored by Justice Sotomayor, takes a markedly different approach to this case, arguing that it punishes people “for being homeless,” which they describe as “unconscionable and unconstitutional.”
These Justices contend that majority “fails to engage seriously with the precipitating causes of homelessness, the damaging effects of criminalization, and the myriad legitimate reasons people may lack or decline shelter.”
“It is possible to acknowledge and balance the issues facing local governments, the humanity and dignity of homeless people, and our constitutional principles,” they argue. “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.”
“This Court must safeguard those rights even when, and perhaps especially when, doing so is uncomfortable or unpopular,” the dissent states. “Otherwise, ‘the words of the Constitution become little more than good advice.'”
The dissent goes on to lay out the potential impact that incarceration could have on a homeless individual who is arrested for sleeping in public and contends that policies such as those in this case are in ineffective means of achieving the purported goals.
The dissent’s analysis of Robinson also differs substantially from that of the majority, pointing out that the Court at the time “did not rely on the harshness of the criminal penalty itself” but “understood that ‘imprisonment for ninety days is not, in the abstract, a punishment which is either cruel or unusual.'”
“Instead, it reasoned that, when imposed because of a person’s status, ‘[e]ven one day in prison would be a cruel and unusual punishment,'” they state.
These Justices go on to explain why they believe that the Grants Pass ordinance does, in fact, criminalize homelessness as a status, as is prohibited under Robinson.
“The status of being homeless (lacking available shelter) is defined by the very behavior singled out for punishment (sleeping outside),” the dissent argues. “The Ordinances’ purpose, text, and enforcement confirm that they target status, not conduct. For someone with no available shelter, the only way to comply with the Ordinances is to leave Grants Pass altogether.”
The dissenting Justices also take direct issue with the majority’s assertion that the Grants Pass ordinance would be enforced equally against “a backpacker on vacation passing through town, or a student who abandons his dorm room to camp out in protest” as it would against a homeless individual, referring to this situation as a “fantasy.”
At the close of their opinion, the dissenting Justices suggest that with the majority’s decision, the Court “abdicates” its responsibility to “play its role in safeguarding constitutional liberties for the most vulnerable among us.”
Click Here to Read the Supreme Court’s Full Opinion
It took scotus to figure this out. Any half asleep third grader could tell you that.