The Supreme Court is being urged to consider whether homeless people have a constitutional right to sleep on public sidewalks and camp in parks.

California city officials say they are dealing with this

a

crisis of homeless camps exacerbated by the courts.

At issue is a 9th Circuit Court ruling that invoked the 8th Amendment’s prohibition against “cruel and unusual punishment” to prohibit West Coast cities from making it a crime to sleep or camp on public property .

Judge Marsha Berzon, a senior liberal on the appeals court, cited Supreme Court rulings from the early 1960s

,

who said

That

Drug addicts and alcoholics should not be punished just because they are addicted. She said the same principle applies to the homeless.

Just as the state should not criminalize being homeless in public places, Berzon writes, the state should not criminalize behavior that is an inevitable consequence of being homeless, namely sitting, lying or sleeping on the street.

Four years ago, numerous business groups and cities in California, including Los Angeles, joined appeals urging the Supreme Court to review that ruling in a Boise, Idaho, case.

However, to their surprise and dismay, the judges dismissed the appeal without comment or dissent. They may have done this because Boise officials repeated part of an important ordinance after losing in a lower court. The appeal can be considered moot.

But the lack of a decision left the constitutional dispute untouched, and the issue is now back in the Supreme Court in a new appeal from a small southern Oregon town.

Grants Pass has a population of about 38,000, of whom 50 or as many as 600 are homeless. Shortly after the 2018 9th Circuit ruling in the Boise case, attorneys filed a lawsuit on behalf of several homeless people in the city who said they had been harassed by police and ticketed for sleeping in a park.

In response, a federal judge ruled that the city cannot enforce a strict ban on camping in its public parks, and that ruling was affirmed by the 9th Circuit in a 2-1 decision.

Writing for the majority, Judge Roslyn Silver said she was required to follow court precedent in the Boise case, which stated that “the 8th Amendment prohibits the imposition of criminal penalties for sitting, sleeping or lying outside on public to homeless people who cannot find shelter.

That, in turn, led to the new Supreme Court appeal.

Lawyers who have worked on the case are optimistic that the court will hear the case, as the homeless problem and its impact on cities has become much worse.

Their appeal, filed late Tuesday, argues that the 9th Circuit ruling and the federal judges who applied it “created a legal roadblock that prevents a comprehensive response to the growth of public encampments in the West.” The consequences of inaction are dire for those living in both countries’ and near encampments: crime, fires, the re-emergence of medieval diseases, environmental damage and record levels of drug overdoses and deaths in the public streets… Only this [Supreme] The Court can put an end to this misguided project of federal courts dictating homelessness policies under the banner of the 8th Amendment.”

Last month, conservatives on the 9th Circuit Court criticized their liberal colleagues for refusing to reconsider their previous rulings on homeless rights.

“Homelessness is currently the defining public health and safety crisis in the western United States. California, for example, is home to half of the people nationwide who are without shelter on any given night,” Judge Milan Smith wrote in a dissenting opinion. joined by eight others.

“There are roughly 70,000 homeless people in the city of Los Angeles alone. There are parts of the city where you can’t help but think that government has shied away from its most fundamental responsibilities under the social contract: ensuring public safety and preserving public space. open to all,” Smith wrote. “One-off public spaces such as parks, many of which provide scarce outdoor space in densely populated working-class neighborhoods, have been filled with thousands of tents and makeshift structures, and are no longer welcoming to the wider community.”

The active justices of the 9th Circuit were tied 14-13 on whether to rehear the Grants Pass case, just short of the necessary majority. But such a broad division on America’s largest appeals court often seems to prompt a review by the Supreme Court.

Under court rules, the attorneys representing the homeless plaintiffs have 30 days to file a response to the appeal in the City of Grants Pass v. Johnson. If that schedule holds, the judges could decide at the end of fall whether to hear the case and issue a ruling early next year.