Issue
Does the Eighth Amendment’s Cruel and Unusual Punishment Clause prohibit municipalities from enforcing generally applicable laws regulating sleeping and camping on public property?
Holding
In a 6-3 ruling, the Court concluded:
- No, the Eighth Amendment’s protections against cruel and unusual punishment does not prohibit local governments from passing or enforcing ordinances banning sleeping or camping on public property.
- Nor does the Eighth Amendment’s Cruel and Unusual Punishment Clause prohibit the enforcement of such statutes against people who are involuntarily homeless.
NOTE: Although the Supreme Court ruled that cities may criminalize and punish such conduct, nothing in this decision says that punishing someone with a fine that they are unable to pay is constitutional. In fact, that question of whether fining people more than they can afford is a violation of the Eighth Amendment’s Excessive Fines Clause was not considered in this case.
Facts
In 2019, the Ninth Circuit issued a decision in Martin v. City of Boise holding that “the Eighth Amendment prohibits the imposition of criminal penalties for sitting, sleeping, or lying outside on public property for homeless individuals who cannot obtain shelter.” The underlying reasoning was that the Supreme Court had previously ruled in Robinson v. California that it violated the Eighth Amendment’s Cruel and Unusual Punishment Clause to criminalize a person’s status, rather than their conduct (in Robinson, the statute criminalize the status of being a drug addict, not using drugs). The Ninth Circuit concluded that broad prohibitions on sleeping or sitting essentially prohibited unhoused people from merely existing in public spaces (at least at certain hours) if there were no alternative shelters for people to go to, meaning it was their status of homelessness that was being criminalized.
The City of Grants Pass, Oregon, had a series of ordinances on the books that prohibited camping—which it defined as sleeping with any form of protection from the elements—in any public space. A violation of these ordinances resulted in a minimum $295 fine. Multiple violations of the ordinance could lead to exclusion orders from parks or other public spaces, a violation of which could then result in a criminal trespass charge.
In the wake of Martin, several unhoused individuals in Grants Pass filed a class action lawsuit to prevent the City from enforcing these ordinances. At the time, the city’s unhoused population well exceeded the number of available shelter beds. A federal district court enjoined enforcement of these ordinances saying that, under Martin, these ordinances effectively criminalized the status of homelessness in violation of the Punishment Clause. The district court also ruled that the fines imposed on homeless people under these ordinances violated the Eighth Amendment’s Excessive Fines Clause.
The City appealed the District Court’s injunction on Punishment Clause grounds to the Ninth Circuit (without addressing the Excessive Clause findings). The Ninth Circuit affirmed the injunction, at which point the City appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Majority’s Reasoning
The Court’s majority took the position that the ordinances at issue in Grants Pass were distinguishable from Robinson because they criminalized conduct (i.e., sleeping, camping, using a blanket) rather than status (i.e., being homeless). Instead, the majority looked to Powell v. Texas, in which the Court found that a law criminalizing public intoxication was not the same as criminalizing someone’s status as an alcoholic. As the Powell court reasoned, it was the act of being drunk in public, not the compulsion to drink, that was being criminalized.
In analyzing cases under the Cruel and Unusual Punishment Clause, the majority found that fining people for sleeping in public was neither cruel (because it did not cause “terror, pain, disgrace” or other “atrocious” punishments) nor unusual (in that punishing such behavior was commonplace around the country). Therefore, prohibiting sleeping or camping in public did not violate the Cruel and Unusual Punishment Clause.
The Court reversed the Ninth Circuit ruling on the Cruel and Unusual Punishment Clause and remanded it “for further proceedings consistent with the opinion.”
The Dissent
A strong dissent written by Justice Sotomayor, and joined by Justices Kagan and Jackson, argued that the types of ordinances at issue in Grants Pass do indeed effectively criminalize the status of homelessness because they preclude those who are unhoused from engaging in the necessary bodily function of sleep anywhere in public, even when there are no other shelter options available. By definition, that criminalizes their homelessness, not their conduct.
Beyond the Cruel and Unusual Punishment issues at play, however, the dissent recognized that, even if the homelessness was not a status protected under these facts, the primary punishments provided by these ordinances – namely a fine of at least $295 – raised issues under the Eighth Amendment’s Excessive Fines Clause, which are not resolved by this decision. As the Fines & Fees Justice Center argued in an amicus brief to the Supreme Court in this case, the District Court’s original injunction in Grants Pass was premised on violations of both the Punishment Clause and the Excessive Fines Clause. The Supreme Court’s jurisprudence on each of these Clauses diverges in significant ways, so that the analysis under each clause has separate criteria that must be considered independently from each other. When the City appealed to the Ninth Circuit, it only challenged the Punishment Clause Finding, failing to challenge or brief the Excessive Fines Clause arguments. Justice Sotomayor’s dissent points out that the Ninth Circuit must now contend with that: either the court must decide that the City waived its arguments on excessive fines by not raising them or ask for further briefing on the issue. Either way, the constitutionality of the nearly $300 fines being imposed on homeless people who cannot reasonably pay them remains an open question.
You can find the court’s full opinion here.
City of Grants Pass v. Johnson
144 S. Ct. 2202 | June 28, 2024