Supreme Court refuses to hear homeless case
Right to sleep on sidewalks protected
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court refused Monday to hear a major case on homeless, letting stand a ruling that protects their right to sleep on the sidewalk or in public parks if no other shelter is available.
The justices without comment or a dissent said they would not hear the case from Boise, Idaho, which challenged a ruling by a federal appeals court.
The outcome is a significant victory for homeless activists and a setback for city officials in California and other western states who argued the appeals court ruling undercut their authority to regulate encampments on the sidewalks.
Lawyers for the homeless had argued it was cruel and wrong to punish people who have nowhere else to sleep. They won a major victory last year when the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that prosecuting people for sleeping on the sidewalks violated the 8th Amendment’s ban on “cruel and unusual” punishment.
The appeals court ruling extended to California and eight other Western states, and said a city ordinance “violates the 8th Amendment insofar as it imposes criminal sanctions against homeless individuals for sleeping outdoors on public property, when no alternative shelter is available to them.”
The legal case had arisen a decade before when Robert Martin and several other homeless people were given tickets or fines of between $25 and $75 for camping on the sidewalk. They then joined a lawsuit that challenged the punishments as unconstitutional.
A large group of West Coast cities, including Los Angeles, had urged the Supreme Court to hear the appeal in City of Boise v. Martin.
They said the “creation of a de facto constitutional right to live on sidewalks and in parks will cripple the ability of … municipalities in the 9th Circuit to maintain the health and safety of their communities,” wrote lawyers for Boise.
“Nothing in the Constitution … requires cities to surrender their streets, sidewalks, parks, riverbeds and other public areas to vast encampments.”
A right to sleep on the sidewalk is not new for Los Angeles or city officials. In 2006, the 9th Circuit handed down a similar ruling that said the city may not enforce laws against sleeping in public places. Rather than appeal, the city agreed to not enforce such laws from 9 p.m. to 6 a.m.
The 9th Circuit ruled last year that the city may not enforce ordinances that “criminalize the simple act of sleeping outside on public property.”
The Supreme Court has previously relied on the 8th Amendment to limit punishment for some crimes, but it is rare for judges to strike down a criminal law as cruel and unusual punishment. The 9th Circuit cited a 1962 decision in Robinson v. California, which struck down part of a state law that “made the status of narcotic addiction a criminal offense.”
Judge Marsha Berzon said this principle extends to homelessness. “Just as the state may not criminalize the state of being homeless in public places,” she wrote, it “may not criminalize conduct that is an unavoidable consequence of being homeless.”