Oklahoma Camping Ban Will Stand
The U.S. Supreme Court wrapped up its term with a doozy, holding that the president is immune from prosecution for official acts. At the other end of the privilege spectrum, the court also concluded that camping bans are valid.
As Heather Warlick reported, the majority held that a case from Grants Pass, Oregon, prohibiting camping on public land did not constitute cruel and unusual punishment, which is prohibited under the Eighth Amendment.
Whittle down the 74 pages of legal reasoning and you get to the heart of the question: Is the prohibition of public camping effectively the same thing as making it illegal to be homeless?
Writing for the majority, Justice Neal Gorsuch argued that the camping ban in question merely limits camping and is applied to transients, backpackers and protesters alike. Just as there can be no law criminalizing addiction, there can be laws prohibiting drug use. That is to say that just because someone suffers from addiction doesn’t mean they can use their drug of choice without legal consequences. Similarly, the argument goes that just because someone is without nighttime shelter doesn’t mean they can sleep anywhere they like.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined in her dissent by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, argued that sleep is a biological necessity and that those without nighttime shelter have no choice but to sleep somewhere. The challenge to the Grants Pass ordinance said when there aren’t enough shelter beds available, those without shelter of their own still must sleep and to outlaw sleeping in a public place leaves only two options: stay awake or break the law. Since sleep is involuntary, the law effectively criminalized a person’s status rather than a wilful act.
Both arguments cited a 1962 case, Robinson v. California, in which a city made addiction a crime, which the court found to be unconstitutional. The majority argued it did not apply to the Grants Pass case because that law outlawed camping, not homelessness. The dissent argued that since sleep is not an option the law effectively criminalized homelessness.
Both acknowledged it’s a challenging, growing problem, with approximately 600,000 people experiencing homelessness in the United States on any given night.
More worth reading:
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Eighty-two New Laws in Effect
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“I don’t give a crap about clowns.”
— Blake Shelton
Happy Independence Day. First Watch will return on Monday.
Ted Streuli
Executive Director, Oklahoma Watch
tstreuli@oklahomawatch.org
