Supreme Court rules bans on public camping is not ‘cruel and unusual punishment’ as homelessness skyrockets in liberal cities

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Tents set up by homeless people crowd the sidewalks in Portland, Ore.(ADA Complaint)

The Supreme Court’s  6-3 decision in Johnson v. Grants Pass rules that barring people from camping in public parks- and imposing fines on those who do – does not amount to cruel and unusual punishment.

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The lawsuit comes as very liberal cities are dealing with the overwhelming amount of homelessness, which has turned its streets into cesspools rampant with crime and drugs.

Authored by Justice Neil Gorsuch, the decision reverses a Ninth Circuit ruling and is a win for West Coast governments, assuring that they have the authority to enforce anti-camping laws and to clear sprawling homeless camps from their parks and sidewalks.

The court found that the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment is a “poor foundation” for establishing a right for the homeless to sleep outdoors if they have nowhere else to go. The origins of the clause sought to prohibit “barbaric punishments like ‘disemboweling, quartering, public dissection, and burning alive,’ even though those practices had by then ‘fallen into disuse,’” Gorsuch wrote.

Barring people from camping in public parks, and imposing limited fines for first-time offenders with a threat of 30 days in jail for continued offenses does not subject violators to “terror, pain, or disgrace,” the court found. Nor is it unusual, “because similarly limited fines and jail terms have been and remain” common “for punishing criminal offenses throughout the country.”

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However, Gorsuch noted that the ruling in no way prevents cities, counties, and states from “declining to criminalize public camping altogether.” Therefore, local governments don’t need to take any actions at all.

Justice Sonia Sotamayor, in a dissent joined by the court’s two other liberal justices, wrote that the court’s majority is offering the homeless “an impossible choice: Either stay awake or be arrested.” Criminalizing homelessness, she added, “can cause a cascade of harm.”

“It is possible to acknowledge and balance the issues facing local governments, the humanity and dignity of homeless people, and our constitutional principles,” she wrote.

National Review reports the Ninth Circuit’s “experiment” with prohibiting camping bans on the grounds that they subject homeless people to cruel and unusual punishment was “doubtless well intended,” the court found. But federal judges are not in a position to decide what constitutes involuntary homelessness or when a shelter is “practically available.”

“Homelessness is complex. Its causes are many. So may be the public policy responses required to address it,” the opinion states. “A handful of federal judges cannot begin to ‘match’ the collective wisdom the American people possess in deciding ‘how to best handle’ a pressing social question like homelessness.”

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