The Supreme Court meets Friday to consider for the first time whether the Constitution gives homeless people a right to sleep on the sidewalk.
A vast majority of Los Angeles County voters feel that law enforcement should have a larger role in addressing the homelessness crisis, according to a new poll conducted for the Los Angeles Times and the Los Angeles Business Council Institute.. In 2006, the 9th Circuit handed down a similar ruling in a case called Jones vs. Los Angeles. The appeals court said then that the city could not enforce an ordinance against homeless individuals “for involuntarily sitting, lying and sleeping in public.
Rather than appeal in that case, the city reached a settlement with the lawyers who brought the suit and agreed to not enforce restrictions on sleeping or camping from 9 p.m until 6 a.m. That rule remains in force.to the current crisis in Los Angeles.“As a result of the Jones litigation, Los Angeles has experienced, first-hand, 11 years of grappling with the delicate balance required when public sidewalks serve two essentially incompatible functions,” they said.
The justices are likely to be skeptical about a ruling that relies on the 8th Amendment to void a criminal law. In the past, the high court has invoked the ban on “cruel and unusual punishments” only to limit punishments for certain crimes. Rulings in 2002 and 2005, for example, relied on the 8th Amendment to end the death penalty for defendants who had a mental disability or were under age 18 at the time of their crime.
However, the 9th Circuit pointed to a 1962 decision in Robinson vs. California that struck down part of a state law that “made the ‘status’ of narcotic addiction a criminal offense.” The justices said then that people could be prosecuted for selling or using drugs, but they overturned the conviction of a Los Angeles man who had been convicted entirely on the basis that a police officer testified seeing needle marks in his arm.
But that decision stands alone, according to the appeal in the Boise case. No high court decision “has ever invalidated on 8th Amendment grounds a generally applicable law regulating conduct,” they said.
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