on 18 April 2024. Credit: Reuters
The US Supreme Court ruled Friday that cities can fine and jail unhoused people for sleeping outside, arguing that criminalizing camping when there is no shelter available does not constitute “cruel and unusual punishment”.
The 6-3 ruling is the most consequential legal decision on homelessness in decades in the US.
The case was brought by Grants Pass, Oregon. The city has local laws that authorize law enforcement to ticket and prosecute unhoused people. But the city had been barred by several courts from enforcing its ordinances because of a landmark 2018 ruling by the ninth circuit court of appeals.
That ruling, in Martin v Boise, applied to nine western states and held that giving people citations for sleeping outside when a community can’t offer shelter violates the eighth amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment.
With its ruling Friday, the Supreme Court reversed the protections for unhoused people.
Some local governments had argued that the […]
I see this decision as the full flowering of Ronald Reagan’s attack on housing. He never believed that government should be in that business, and was happy to penalize those victims of capitalism at the bottom of the system. So we will see a reversion not to the 1950’s but to the 1920’s where we will have tent cities for the homeless. Does anyone believe that this will lead to anything but social unrest?
A failing society will always put more effort into hiding the symptoms of it’s failures then it will put into fixing those failures.
I totally agree with you, but then reality creeps in. How do we get rid of this super majority of political, religious un-Constitutionally horrible justices? I can’t see impeachment working because their rulings have been so opposite the Constitution, our moral fiber, and the will of the majority of Americans. There clearly is a flaw in democracy that our hands are tied and left to these 5 people who ultimately will destroy our democracy, with our without Trump! It is soooo frightening to even think about.
What astonishes me is that so many find this decision difficult to understand. It is actually very easy and straightforward, but we don’t want to admit to ourselves how bad things really are. This decision is an extension of the so called “War on Drugs” mindset. This is a war on people. Part of the neo-liberal economic model. It is power put into action, plain and simple. Cruelty is the point.