In 2018, the Oregon Law Center filed a class action lawsuit on behalf of Debra Blake, a woman who’d been homeless in Grants Pass for nearly a decade and accumulated more than $5,000 in fines for sleeping in public. After Blake died in 2021, Gloria Johnson and John Logan, another homeless resident, stepped in as the named representatives in the class action.
The lawsuit argued that fines and jail time violated the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment because people involuntarily experiencing homelessness have nowhere to sleep but public spaces. Grants Pass, a small city located in southern Oregon, has just a few homeless shelter options that fall far short of meeting every homeless resident’s needs.
Lawyers representing Grants Pass have argued that the city needs the laws to address safety and public health issues in homeless encampments.
Grants Pass v. Johnson has wended through the appeals process, with lower courts agreeing with the plaintiffs’ argument that the law violates the Eighth Amendment. It now falls to the Supreme Court to decide. The justices are expected to rule in late June.
After oral argument Monday, The New York Times reported that a majority of justices appeared to side with the City of Grants Pass, an outcome that would allow cities to more easily impose fines and jail time for people sleeping in public, regardless of the availability of shelter. Other court watchers, however, said that several justices floated the possibility that the federal judiciary might lack jurisdiction to hear the case at all and that homelessness policy should remain a local government issue.
“If the Supreme Court finds in favor of Grants Pass, it will be dystopian,” said Sara Rankin at Monday’s rally. Rankin is a Seattle University law professor and head of the Homeless Rights Advocacy Project. “It will be like a domino effect. Every city is going to then outlaw sleeping within the city boundaries, and you could have an entire patchwork of states in which it is not legal for you to exist if you don’t have a home.”
Though Rankin worries about the ripple effect of the Supreme Court siding with Grants Pass, she cautioned people to understand the limits of the case. It does not have bearing on a city’s legal ability to clear unauthorized encampments; or the ability to restrict when and where people can set up encampments; or even the ability to impose fines or arrests when people refuse offers of available shelter.
Instead, the Court’s ruling will determine primarily whether cities can ban public homelessness regardless of whether there’s adequate shelter or housing for people to move to. In its 2022 ruling in favor of Johnson, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit cited its own 2018 ruling in Martin v. Boise, which said that cities cannot enforce camping bans if there’s inadequate shelter space to offer people.
Josh Cohen
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