"Supreme Court to Consider How Far Cities Can Police Homelessness/A group of homeless people in a small Oregon city challenged local laws banning sleeping in public."

A NYT article about a case up for oral argument today.

The plaintiffs’ argument rests in part on a 1962 case, Robinson v. California, in which the Supreme Court held that laws imposing penalties on people for narcotics addiction violated the Eighth Amendment because they punished a state of being, not a specific action, like drug possession or sale. 

In a similar fashion, the plaintiffs contend, Grants Pass is punishing people for being involuntarily homeless, not for specific actions. That argument held sway in a separate case Martin v. Boise, in 2018. In that case, a panel of judges from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled that Boise, Idaho, had violated the constitutional rights of homeless people by imposing criminal penalties for sleeping and camping outdoors, even though the city did not have enough shelter beds. 

Lawyers for Grants Pass point to the Boise case as a cautionary tale. The decision only hastened “sprawling encampments, rising deaths and widespread harms to the community, as localities are forced to surrender their public spaces,” the lawyers wrote in a brief.