Caseflicks

Supreme Court of the United States • 2024

City of Grants Pass v. Johnson

603 U.S. 520

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Takeaway

In short, the Court overruled the Ninth Circuit’s Martin rule: the Eighth Amendment does not bar cities from enforcing generally applicable public-camping laws against homeless people, even when shelter is unavailable, because those laws regulate conduct rather than punish the status of homelessness.

Background

Grants Pass, Oregon, adopted ordinances restricting sleeping and camping on public property. The code generally barred establishing a campsite—defined to include using bedding, sleeping bags, or similar materials to maintain a temporary place to live—on public property and in city parks. Initial violations could result in civil fines. Repeated violations could lead to temporary exclusion from parks, and violating an exclusion order could result in criminal-trespass charges carrying up to 30 days in jail and a fine.

Two people experiencing homelessness sued on behalf of a class of “involuntarily homeless” people in Grants Pass. Relying on the Ninth Circuit’s earlier decision in Martin v. Boise, they argued that enforcing the ordinances against people lacking practically available shelter violated the Eighth Amendment’s Cruel and Unusual Punishments Clause. The district court found that Grants Pass had more homeless people than available shelter beds and treated the local religious shelter’s beds as unavailable in part because of its rules on smoking and religious services. It enjoined enforcement of the ordinances against homeless people.

A divided Ninth Circuit affirmed in relevant part. It held that, under Martin, people without access to practically available shelter could not be punished for camping with rudimentary protection from the elements. The Supreme Court granted review and reversed.

Issues

Issue #1

Whether the Eighth Amendment’s Cruel and Unusual Punishments Clause bars Grants Pass from enforcing generally applicable public-camping laws against people experiencing homelessness.

Holding

No. The Clause does not prohibit enforcement of Grants Pass’s public-camping ordinances merely because a defendant is homeless or lacks shelter.

Reasoning

The Court read the Cruel and Unusual Punishments Clause principally as a limit on the method or kind of punishment imposed after a criminal conviction, rather than a general limit on what conduct state and local governments may criminalize. Historically, the Clause addressed barbaric punishments calculated to add terror, pain, or disgrace, and punishments that had fallen out of ordinary use.

The sanctions at issue did not independently qualify as cruel or unusual. An initial civil fine, a temporary park-exclusion order for repeat violations, and a potential maximum jail term of 30 days for criminal trespass are conventional penalties, not punishments designed to inflict terror, pain, or disgrace. Similar fines and short jail terms have long been ordinary features of criminal law.

The Court emphasized that other constitutional provisions and legal doctrines may constrain enforcement practices. Due process, equal protection, fair-notice rules, protections against selective prosecution, and state-law defenses such as necessity may all matter in particular cases. But the Court held that the Eighth Amendment’s Cruel and Unusual Punishments Clause was not the source of the broad constitutional rule adopted in Martin.

Issue #2

Whether Robinson v. California makes Grants Pass’s ordinances unconstitutional because they punish the status of homelessness.

Holding

No. Robinson prohibits criminalizing a mere status, but Grants Pass’s ordinances regulate conduct, not the status of being homeless.

Reasoning

In Robinson, California made the status of being addicted to narcotics itself a criminal offense. The Court held that this unusual status offense could not be punished under the Eighth Amendment, while expressly recognizing the States’ broad authority to criminalize acts such as the knowing use, possession, purchase, or sale of narcotics.

Grants Pass’s ordinances prohibit acts associated with public camping, such as occupying a campsite on public property for the purpose of maintaining a temporary place to live. Their terms apply regardless of a person’s housing status: a homeless person, a vacationing backpacker, or a student camping in protest could all violate the ordinances.

The Court characterized Robinson as a narrow and unusual exception to the ordinary understanding of the Eighth Amendment. Because Grants Pass did not make homelessness itself a crime, Robinson did not control the case.

Issue #3

Whether Robinson should be extended to prohibit punishment for conduct that homeless people allegedly cannot avoid because they have nowhere else to sleep.

Holding

No. The Court declined to extend Robinson from pure status offenses to conduct that may be described as involuntary or occasioned by a person’s status.

Reasoning

The Court treated Powell v. Texas as the controlling guide. Powell rejected the argument that punishing public intoxication effectively punished alcoholism, even if an alcoholic’s conduct could in some sense be called involuntary. Powell limited Robinson to laws criminalizing a mere status and left governments authority to punish acts committed with the required mental state.

Applying Powell, the Court concluded that public camping is conduct rather than status. The fact that some homeless people may have powerful practical reasons to sleep outdoors does not transform a law regulating public camping into a status crime under the Eighth Amendment.

The Court also rejected the Ninth Circuit’s shelter-availability framework as ungrounded in constitutional text and unworkable in practice. It found no Eighth Amendment standard for determining who is “involuntarily” homeless, when shelter is sufficiently available or adequate, or what equipment and activities a city must permit in public spaces.

In the Court’s view, making those judgments constitutional questions would force federal judges to create a nationwide doctrine of criminal responsibility without textual guidance and would displace state and local policymaking. Questions about how to address homelessness, shelter capacity, public safety, and the availability of defenses are generally for democratic institutions rather than federal courts applying the Cruel and Unusual Punishments Clause.

Concurrences

Justice Thomas

Reasoning

Justice Thomas joined the Court’s opinion in full but argued that Robinson v. California was wrongly decided. In his view, the original meaning of the Cruel and Unusual Punishments Clause concerns the kinds of penalties imposed for crimes, not substantive limits on what legislatures may criminalize. He criticized Robinson for relying on contemporary attitudes rather than the Constitution’s fixed text and original meaning.

He would not revisit Robinson in this case because Grants Pass’s ordinances regulate conduct rather than status. Still, he urged the Court to overrule Robinson in an appropriate future case rather than leave its reasoning in the background of Eighth Amendment doctrine.

Justice Thomas also questioned whether the Eighth Amendment was implicated by the city’s civil fines and civil park-exclusion orders at all. He reasoned that “punishment” originally referred to a penalty imposed for a crime, and he regarded the theory that civil sanctions become Eighth Amendment punishments merely because later violations might produce criminal-trespass charges as too speculative.

Dissents

Justice Sotomayor

Reasoning

Justice Sotomayor argued that sleep is a biological necessity and that, for people with no available shelter, punishing sleeping in public with even a blanket or makeshift pillow effectively punishes homelessness itself. In her view, the City’s ordinances left homeless residents with the impossible choice of staying awake, leaving the city, or facing citations and possible arrest.

She read Robinson as establishing a substantive Eighth Amendment limit on criminalization: a government may not punish a person for a status, including when it uses conduct inseparable from that status as a proxy. Homelessness is defined by lacking a fixed, regular, and adequate nighttime residence; for a person without shelter, sleeping outside is not meaningfully separable from that status.

The ordinances’ purpose, text, and enforcement history, she concluded, confirmed that Grants Pass targeted homeless people rather than neutral camping conduct. City officials had discussed making conditions uncomfortable enough that homeless people would leave town, and officers reportedly did not cite non-homeless people for activities such as lying on a blanket in a park or using a sleeping bag to watch stars.

Justice Sotomayor distinguished Powell v. Texas. Powell involved conduct—public intoxication—that could be involuntary because of alcoholism. This case, she said, involved conduct that defines homelessness when a person has no alternative shelter. Thus, she viewed the case as a straightforward application of Robinson, not an effort to expand it to all acts influenced by a person’s condition.

She stressed that the Ninth Circuit’s rule was narrow. It did not prevent cities from regulating the time, place, and manner of public sleeping; enforcing prohibitions on tents, fires, obstruction, violence, drug activity, littering, public urination, or defecation; clearing dangerous encampments; or imposing penalties on people who decline realistically accessible shelter. Courts can also make the factual determinations concerning shelter availability and basic bedding that the majority deemed difficult.

Finally, Justice Sotomayor noted that other legal limits may remain relevant on remand, including Oregon’s statute requiring objectively reasonable time, place, and manner regulations for homeless persons; the Excessive Fines Clause; due process limits on vague or status-based offenses; and potential Fourth Amendment protections for homeless persons’ property.