U.S. Supreme Court to review ruling blocking Grants Pass from punishing homeless people sleeping in public places

The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday granted a petition from the city of Grants Pass to review a lower court ruling that prohibited the city from punishing homeless people who sleep in public places when they have nowhere else to go.

Grants Pass asked the nation’s high court to consider if the enforcement of camping restrictions on public property constitutes “cruel and unusual punishment” prohibited by the Eighth Amendment.

A three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in 2022 ruled that the city could not enforce its public-camping and park-exclusion ordinances against “involuntarily homeless persons” for the “mere act of sleeping” or camping in public spaces when “there is no other place in the city for them to go.”

The 9th Circuit’s ruling in the Grants Pass case rested partly on a prior ruling in a 2018 case involving the city of Boise, which Grants Pass and others predicted could “paralyze cities across the West” in addressing urgent safety and public health risks resulting from an “ever-growing sprawl of tents and makeshift structures,” attorneys for the city wrote.

“This case offered the Ninth Circuit an opportunity to correct course,” wrote attorney Theane D. Evangelis, one of the lawyers representing the city of Grants Pass.

Instead, it extended the ruling in the Boise case “to civil citations and affirming a classwide injunction against the City of Grants Pass’s enforcement of its ordinance prohibiting camping on public property.”

Lawyers for the city of Grants Pass argued that there’s nothing cruel or unusual about a civil fine for violating “commonplace restrictions on public camping.”

Last July, the 9th Circuit denied a review of its ruling by its full court, which prompted unusually scathing dissents and statements by a group of 15 senior appellate judges and active judges who blasted the original Grants Pass decision and urged it be corrected.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom, the San Francisco City Attorney’s Office, the city of Phoenix and others submitted friend of the court briefs accompanying Grants Pass’ petition to the Supreme Court, urging the high court to help clarify how cities can respond to homeless encampments.

While states, cities and counties work on long-term approaches to help with the crises of homelessness and lack of housing, “they need the flexibility to also address immediate threats to health and safety in public places - both to individuals living in unsafe encampments and other members of the public impacted by them,” read the brief submitted by Newsom.

Evangelis, the counsel for Grants Pass, said in a statement Friday, “As hundreds of amici have made clear in more than two dozen briefs filed in the Supreme Court, the Ninth Circuit’s decisions in Johnson v. City of Grants Pass and Martin v. City of Boise have contributed to the growing problem of encampments in cities across the West. These decisions are legally wrong and have tied the hands of local governments as they work to address the urgent homelessness crisis. The tragedy is that these decisions are actually harming the very people they purport to protect. We look forward to presenting our arguments to the Supreme Court this spring.”

Gloria Johnson and others who have camped in Grants Pass and filed the case against the city defended the initial ruling by the 9th Circuit’s three-judge panel, saying it correctly concluded that Grants Pass’ push to punish involuntarily homeless people for “simply existing” in Grants Pass transgresses the Eight Amendment’s “substantive limits on what can be made criminal and punished as such.”

“The panel held only that the Eighth Amendment prohibits the City from punishing homeless persons for engaging in the unavoidable biological function of sleeping with the minimal bedding necessary to survive cold nights when shelter is unavailable,” wrote Kelsi Brown Corkran, a lawyer representing the plaintiffs. Corkran works for George University Law Center’s Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection.