Before the Supreme Court this week is the question of whether it is legal to ticket and/or remove the unhoused sleeping outside in cities, effectively making it a crime — objectors say — to sleep while unhoused.
The case at SCOTUS involves Grants Pass, Oregon, a small city that — like many in a country where homelessness is on the rise — is trying to prevent people from “sleeping rough” — as the unhoused prefer to describe their situation. Grants Pass wants to banish ad hoc homeless encampments on public grounds.
[The case is called City of Grants Pass, Oregon, Petitioner v. Gloria Johnson, et al., on Behalf of Themselves and All Others Similarly Situated]
In the lower courts, the 8th amendment prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment has limited law enforcement’s ability to clear and fine the unhoused sleeping outside unless they are given refuge elsewhere. The prohibition creates an untenable situation — Grants Pass and other cities claim — that disrupts civic order and presents a danger to citizens both housed and unhoused.
Justice Sonya Sotomayor startled court watchers by putting the situation into extremely dire terms, as the dialogue below reveals.
Justice Sotomayor, damn
Please read all the way down the screenshot even if you don’t click through to read Chris’s full report. https://t.co/sLpZzIJ4r6 pic.twitter.com/XR5kp4i8UV
— Pallavi Guniganti (@PGunigantiAT) April 23, 2024
Grants Pass, like other municipalities large and small, confronts a challenge that can’t be solved by whatever decision comes out of the Supreme Court on the case.
Sotomayor hit on the pass-the-buck problem and superficial solution of moving the unhoused from place to place, saying:
“Where do we put them if every city, every village, every town lacks compassion and passes a law identical to this?”
[NOTE: A Supreme Court finding allowing the Grants Pass practice to stand would essentially permit every town, as Sotomayor posits, to follow suit, just as the Dobbs decision eradicating Roe v. Wade protections cleared every state to enforce its own abortion limitations.]
“Where are they supposed to sleep?” Sotomayor asked. “Are they supposed to kill themselves, not sleeping?”