Supreme Court Conservatives Likely To Roll Back Homeless Rights

But four conservative justices may impact just how far the majority goes.

The Supreme Court appeared likely to scale back homeless rights decisions handed down by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals over the past six years, but how they would do so was unclear as the court’s conservative supermajority splintered on how far they wanted to go.

The case argued before the court on Monday originally came out of Grants Pass, Oregon, where in 2013 city officials enacted anti-camping ordinances that prohibited sleeping outdoors with as little as a blanket. The ordinances also imposed escalatory civil fines on violators, and could ultimately lead to jail time. The city’s policy was challenged by three homeless Grants Pass residents, who claimed it was only enforced on the homeless population and violated the Eighth Amendment. The ordinance was blocked by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in 2022.

That appeals court decision relied on the circuit’s 2018 precedent in Martin v. Boise, a similar case which found that punishing homeless people for sleeping outside when there was no alternative shelter available for them amounted to cruel and unusual punishment under the Constitution’s Eighth Amendment, given that it effectively prohibited people from the basic physical need to sleep. The finding in Martin was in turn based on the 1962 Supreme Court decision in Robinson v. California that prohibited the state from making it illegal to be a drug addict for amounting to cruel and unusual punishment of a status group ― drug addicts.

A number of cases within the Ninth Circuit have since relied on the precedent in Martin in various rulings to restrict the enforcement of laws punishing outdoor sleeping when the number of homeless people exceeds the number of available shelter beds in a particular community.

Martin has “proven unworkable,” Theane Evangelis, the lawyer for the city of Grants Pass, told the court, while urging the court to overturn not only the Ninth Circuit’s ruling against the city, but also the ruling in Martin.