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<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\nThe 6-3 decision was the most significant ruling on the issue from the high court in decades.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It comes as record numbers of Americans lack permanent housing and as both Democratic and Republican leaders have complained a 2018 decision by a lower court has hamstrung their ability to address homeless encampments that threaten health and public safety.<\/p>\n\n\n
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<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\u201cThe Court cannot say that the punishments Grants Pass imposes here qualify as cruel and unusual,\u201d Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote for the majority, referring to the small Oregon municipality at the center of the case.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe city imposes only limited fines for first-time offenders, an order temporarily barring an individual from camping in a public park for repeat offenders, and a maximum sentence of 30 days in jail for those who later violate an order.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Cruel and unusual punishment?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n But Justice Sonia Sotomayor, writing for the court’s liberal minority, said the laws essentially criminalized the act of sleeping.<\/p>\n\n\n \u201cSleep is a biological necessity, not a crime,\u201d Sotomayor wrote in dissent, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson. \u201cFor some people, sleeping outside is their only option.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Sotomayor noted that Grants Pass jails and fines people who sleep in public, such as in a car, or for using as little as a blanket to keep warm or a rolled-up shirt as a pillow. \u201cFor people with no access to shelter, that punishes them for being homeless,\u201d she wrote. \u201cThat is unconscionable and unconstitutional.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which oversees nine Western states, ruled in 2018 that banning camping in areas lacking sufficient shelter beds amounts to cruel and unusual punishment under the 8th Amendment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Supreme Court\u00a0declined to weigh in at the time\u00a0on that case from Boise, Idaho but\u00a0took up the issue\u00a0this term after that precedent was used to challenge anti-camping rules in Grants Pass.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Homeless residents of the southern Oregon city of 38,000 had faced fines starting at $250 and leading to jail time for repeat offenses.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Criminalizing homelessness in a city without a homeless shelter<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Advocates for homeless people said the rules amounted to criminalizing someone for having nowhere to live. The city lacks sufficient affordable housing. The one shelter for adults requires attending daily Christian services and other rules. Hundreds of residents are unhoused.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “We don’t want to be in the parks,” said Helen Cruz, a Grants Pass resident who lacks permanent shelter. “We want a place to live.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n City officials said without the Supreme Court\u2019s intervention, they would be forced to surrender their public spaces.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Department of Justice had mostly backed the challengers while also arguing that the appeals court ruling was too broad and didn\u2019t take into account individual circumstances such as whether someone had access to a shelter and refused it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n On any given night in the United States, more than 600,000 people are likely to be homeless, according to the federal government. Last year, 40% of homeless individuals slept under bridges, on sidewalks, in parks, in cars, in abandoned buildings, and other public locations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The case, which is the City of Grants Pass v. Johnson, attracted an unusually large number of briefs filed by outside interests.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Advocates for the homeless hoped that even if the decision didn’t go their way, the case would spur elected officials at all levels of government to do more to address homelessness.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Supreme Court ruled Friday that people without homes can be fined for sleeping in public spaces, overturning a lower court\u2019s ruling that enforcing camping bans when shelter is lacking… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":47097,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_seopress_robots_follow":"","_seopress_robots_imageindex":"","_seopress_robots_snippet":"","_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"14","_seopress_robots_breadcrumbs":"","_seopress_robots_freeze_modified_date":"","_seopress_robots_custom_modified_date":"","_seopress_robots_canonical":"","_seopress_social_fb_title":"","_seopress_social_fb_desc":"","_seopress_social_fb_img":"","_seopress_social_fb_img_attachment_id":0,"_seopress_social_fb_img_width":0,"_seopress_social_fb_img_height":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_title":"","_seopress_social_twitter_desc":"","_seopress_social_twitter_img":"","_seopress_social_twitter_img_attachment_id":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_img_width":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_img_height":0,"_seopress_redirections_value":"","_seopress_redirections_enabled":"","_seopress_redirections_enabled_regex":"","_seopress_redirections_logged_status":"","_seopress_redirections_param":"","_seopress_redirections_type":0,"_seopress_analysis_target_kw":"","inline_featured_image":false,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"wpai_generated_summary":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":null,"_wpas_customize_per_network":false},"categories":[14],"tags":[8950],"class_list":["post-47095","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-ruling-supreme-court-allows-cities-to-ban-homeless-camps"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47095","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=47095"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47095\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":47099,"href":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47095\/revisions\/47099"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/47097"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=47095"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=47095"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=47095"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/06\/justice-sonia-sotomayor.jpg?resize=1024%2C683&ssl=1\")
<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n