City of Grants Pass v. Johnson

Based on Wikipedia: City of Grants Pass v. Johnson

In March 2013, the Grants Pass City Council held a community meeting to brainstorm solutions to homelessness. Council President Lily Morgan had a clear goal: make the city "uncomfortable enough for homeless individuals in our city so they will want to move on down the road." A decade later, those words would echo through the halls of the United States Supreme Court, becoming Exhibit A in a case that would reshape how American cities can treat their poorest residents.

The case of City of Grants Pass v. Johnson, decided in 2024, asked a deceptively simple question: Can a city make it illegal for homeless people to sleep outside when there's nowhere else for them to go? The Supreme Court said yes, by a six-to-three margin. But understanding what that means—and why it matters—requires unwinding a tangled legal thread that stretches back more than sixty years.

When Being Something Becomes a Crime

In 1962, the Supreme Court heard a case called Robinson v. California. A man had been convicted under a state law that made it a crime to "be addicted to the use of narcotics." Not to possess drugs. Not to use them. Simply to be an addict.

The Court struck down the law. The Eighth Amendment to the Constitution prohibits "cruel and unusual punishment," and the justices reasoned that punishing someone for a status—for what they are rather than what they do—crosses that line. After all, addiction is a medical condition. You might as well criminalize having a cold.

This distinction between status and conduct seems clear enough. But life rarely cooperates with legal categories.

Six years later, in Powell v. Texas, an alcoholic man was arrested for public intoxication. His lawyers argued that since he couldn't help being an alcoholic, and alcoholics drink, punishing him for being drunk in public was really punishing him for his status as an addict—the same thing Robinson had prohibited.

The Court disagreed, though not with a clean majority. In a fractured decision, the justices upheld the conviction. The crucial distinction, as they saw it, was that Powell had made a choice. He chose to drink. He chose to drink enough to become intoxicated. He chose to do this in public. Those were acts, not a status. The fact that his alcoholism made those choices nearly inevitable didn't change the legal calculus.

One justice, Byron White, concurred in the result but for narrower reasons. He would have ruled for Powell only because Powell hadn't proven that his alcoholism truly compelled him to drink. Had Powell shown that his condition left him no choice, White might have sided the other way.

This matters because of a somewhat arcane legal principle called the Marks rule. When the Supreme Court can't agree on a single rationale, lower courts are supposed to follow the "narrowest" opinion that still commands a majority. Justice White's concurrence became, in effect, the law—at least for courts trying to interpret what Powell actually meant.

The Ninth Circuit Draws a Line

Fast forward to 2018. The Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit—which covers nine western states including California, Oregon, and Washington, where homelessness is most acute—heard a case called Martin v. Boise.

Boise, Idaho had anti-camping ordinances. They also had more homeless people than shelter beds. The Ninth Circuit connected these dots: if there's literally nowhere legal for homeless people to sleep, then enforcing anti-camping laws against them criminalizes the status of being homeless, not just the act of camping. You can't prosecute people for doing something they have no choice but to do.

The logic drew directly from Justice White's concurrence in Powell. An alcoholic who can prove he has no choice but to drink cannot be punished for drinking. A homeless person who has no choice but to sleep outside cannot be punished for sleeping outside. The core principle of Robinson—no punishment for status—protected them.

The Supreme Court declined to hear Boise's appeal. That made the Ninth Circuit's ruling binding law across the American West, the very region grappling most intensely with visible homelessness.

Cities chafed under this constraint. They couldn't enforce their camping bans whenever their shelter capacity was full. Which, in most cities, was always.

Grants Pass Makes Its Move

Grants Pass is a small city in southwestern Oregon, population around 40,000, tucked into the mountains near the California border. It had no homeless shelters that met federal standards. It did have ordinances banning camping, sleeping, and parking on public land. And it had a strategy: impose civil fines for violations, then escalate to criminal trespassing charges for repeat offenders.

In October 2018, the Oregon Law Center filed a class action lawsuit on behalf of Debra Blake, who had been homeless in Grants Pass for nearly a decade, cycling in and out of transitional housing. A January 2019 count identified at least 600 homeless people in Josephine County, all potentially subject to the city's enforcement regime.

The federal district court sided with Blake. The judge found that Grants Pass's ordinances violated the Ninth Circuit's Martin v. Boise precedent—the city had no qualifying shelters, so it couldn't punish people for sleeping outside. The court also found that the fines violated the Eighth Amendment's Excessive Fines Clause. Think about it: people too poor to afford housing are unlikely to afford fines imposed for the "crime" of sleeping. And the court found due process violations in how the city could immediately ban alleged violators from all public parks, depriving them of access to public spaces while their appeals wound through the system.

The court even cited Lily Morgan's 2013 statement about making homeless people "uncomfortable enough" to move along. This wasn't neutral law enforcement. This was targeting a population based on their status.

Debra Blake died in 2021. Gloria Johnson and John Logan became the new class representatives. Johnson lived in her van. Logan usually slept in his car at a rest stop. Both had been fined under the ordinances. Neither had faced criminal charges.

The Ninth Circuit upheld the lower court's ruling. The city's defense—that it was criminalizing only the act of bringing camping items onto public land, not the act of sleeping—didn't hold up. Grants Pass gets cold. You need blankets to avoid frostbite. Banning blankets in cold weather is, functionally, banning sleep.

The Supreme Court Weighs In

On January 12, 2024, the Supreme Court agreed to hear Grants Pass's appeal. The case drew enormous attention. Cities across the western United States filed briefs supporting Grants Pass, hoping to regain the power to enforce their anti-camping laws. Homeless advocacy groups filed opposing briefs, warning of a humanitarian crisis if the Ninth Circuit's protections were stripped away.

Oral arguments in April 2024 revealed the Court's likely direction. The lawyer for Grants Pass argued that homeless people could make a "necessity defense" in court—claiming they had no choice but to violate the law—rather than challenging the law itself on constitutional grounds. Justice Elena Kagan pushed back, pointing out that the ordinances were overwhelmingly applied only to homeless people, not to everyone who brought blankets into parks. If you're only prosecuting homeless people, aren't you really prosecuting homelessness?

The Biden administration took a middle position, arguing that courts should evaluate enforcement case by case rather than granting blanket protection whenever a city's homeless population exceeded its shelter capacity.

The lawyer representing Johnson and Logan noted that the fines—$295, rising to $537.60 if unpaid—exceeded the average cost of rental housing in Grants Pass. What rational purpose could such fines serve except to punish people for being poor?

She also reminded the Court of its own history. In Edwards v. California, the Court struck down a law banning the transport of poor people into the state. In Saenz v. Roe, it struck down a minimum residency requirement for welfare benefits. In Papachristou v. City of Jacksonville, it struck down a vague anti-vagrancy ordinance. The Court had, repeatedly, rejected attempts to simply push poor people somewhere else.

Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch suggested that the complexities of homelessness policy were better left to local governments than to federal courts. Justices Clarence Thomas and Sonia Sotomayor—rarely aligned—both wondered whether the case should be dismissed entirely, since Johnson and Logan had only received civil fines, not the criminal punishments at issue in Robinson.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson noted that Oregon had passed a state law in 2023 requiring any local anti-camping ordinances to be "objectively reasonable as to time, place and manner" for homeless people. Perhaps the case was moot—the state had already addressed the problem.

The Majority Speaks

Justice Gorsuch wrote for the six-justice majority. His opinion rested on five pillars.

First, the Eighth Amendment's prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment traditionally focuses on the severity of penalties after conviction. Grants Pass's punishments—fines, temporary park bans, and at most one-month jail sentences—weren't particularly cruel or unusual by historical standards.

Second, while Robinson prohibited criminalizing statuses, Grants Pass's ordinances were facially neutral. They applied to anyone who camped on public land, regardless of their housing situation. The law didn't mention homelessness.

Third, citing Powell, the Court held that even acts strongly associated with a status can be criminalized. Yes, homeless people are more likely to camp on public land. But camping is still an act, not a status. If homeless defendants truly have nowhere else to go, they can raise that as a necessity defense in court.

Fourth, drawing on Kahler v. Kansas—a 2020 case allowing states to abolish the insanity defense—the majority argued that questions about criminal intent and available defenses should be left to elected officials, not mandated by federal courts.

Fifth, and perhaps most revealing, the majority essentially threw up its hands at the complexity of homelessness. These are hard problems, the justices reasoned. The federal judiciary isn't equipped to solve them. Better to let local governments experiment with different approaches.

The Concurrence and the Dissent

Justice Thomas wrote separately to go further than the majority. In his view, an originalist reading of the Eighth Amendment provides no protection against status-based criminalization at all. Robinson v. California was wrongly decided and should be overturned. He also agreed with those who thought Johnson and Logan lacked standing to bring an Eighth Amendment challenge, since they'd faced only civil penalties.

Justice Sotomayor wrote the dissent, joined by Justices Kagan and Jackson. Her opinion was pointed, almost angry.

The facial neutrality of the ordinance was irrelevant, she argued. In practice, it criminalized sleeping in the only place homeless people could sleep. And the ordinance itself defined "campsites" as places where bedding was placed "for the purpose of maintaining a temporary place to live." Campers in a national forest aren't "maintaining a temporary place to live." Homeless people are. The language gave away the game.

Sotomayor noted that Oregon had already prohibited anti-sleeping ordinances at the state level. Local governments didn't need the additional "flexibility" the majority was granting them. And the lower court rulings had explicitly allowed public health and safety measures—just not measures that criminalized the status of homelessness itself.

The dissent took aim at the majority's invocation of Powell. That case involved an alcoholic who chose to drink himself into public intoxication. There was at least some ambiguity about the extent of voluntary choice. But sleeping isn't optional. Everyone must sleep. You cannot meaningfully choose not to sleep. If homeless people have nowhere to sleep except public land, punishing them for sleeping there is punishing them for an involuntary act inseparable from their status.

Most damning, Sotomayor accused the majority of ignoring the real-world consequences of its ruling. Criminal records destroy employment prospects. They make it harder to obtain housing. Criminalizing homelessness doesn't solve homelessness—it entrenches it. And cities like Grants Pass, whose explicit goal was to make homeless people "move on down the road," were using the law not to address homelessness but to export it to neighboring jurisdictions.

The necessity defense the majority touted was cold comfort. Homeless people facing fines and jail time would have to mount individual legal challenges, proving in court that they had no choice but to sleep outside. How many could afford lawyers? How many would even know this defense existed?

What Remains

The dissent concluded by cataloging the legal avenues still open to homeless people challenging anti-camping laws.

First, Oregon's 2023 state law likely preempts Grants Pass's local ordinance, requiring that any regulations on sleeping outdoors be "objectively reasonable." State courts could still strike down unreasonable enforcement.

Second, the Supreme Court sent the case back to the Ninth Circuit to consider whether Grants Pass's specific fines—hundreds of dollars imposed on people who can't afford housing—violate the Excessive Fines Clause. That battle continues.

Third, the Due Process Clause offers another path. In Memorial Hospital v. Maricopa County, the Supreme Court struck down a law limiting medical care based on residency requirements, reasoning that the state couldn't deny people "the basic necessities of life." If sleeping is a basic necessity—and it is—due process arguments may yet prevail.

Fourth, and most creatively, Sotomayor pointed to Trop v. Dulles, a 1958 case holding that stripping someone of citizenship as punishment violated the Eighth Amendment. The underlying logic was that banishment—casting someone out of the community—is cruel and unusual. Anti-camping ordinances that effectively banish homeless people from their cities might be vulnerable on similar grounds.

The Broader Picture

The Grants Pass decision didn't create the homeless crisis, and it won't solve it. What it did was shift power: from federal courts applying constitutional principles to local governments making policy judgments.

That shift has consequences. Cities can now enforce anti-camping bans without waiting for shelter capacity. They can issue fines knowing those fines will never be paid, creating criminal records that follow people for years. They can, in Lily Morgan's words, make life uncomfortable enough that homeless people move on—to the next city, the next county, the next state's problem.

The decision also crystallized a fundamental tension in American law. The Constitution prohibits cruel and unusual punishment. But "unusual" is measured against what's normal, and what's normal is shaped by what's legal. If every city criminalizes homelessness, then punishing homelessness becomes usual by definition. The Eighth Amendment's protections become a floor that sinks as standards decline.

The six justices in the majority believed they were showing humility, deferring to democratic processes rather than imposing judicial solutions to complex social problems. The three justices in dissent believed the majority was abandoning the Court's role as a check on majoritarian excess, leaving the most vulnerable members of society with nowhere to turn.

Both perspectives contain truth. The federal judiciary is ill-equipped to design homelessness policy. But constitutional rights are supposed to protect people precisely when democratic majorities would prefer they didn't. That's the point of having a Bill of Rights.

In Grants Pass, Oregon, the ordinances remain in effect. The fines accumulate. The park bans continue. And somewhere, a person with no home is trying to figure out where they're allowed to sleep tonight—knowing that wherever they choose, they might wake up to a citation, a court date, and one more obstacle between themselves and a stable life.