On Friday, the Supreme Court upheld a ban on outdoor sleeping in the case City of Grants Pass v. Johnson. The 6–3 decision reversed a 2018 ruling by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals prohibiting such bans on the grounds that they violated the Eighth Amendment, under a novel legal theory that outdoor sleeping bans were “cruel and unusual punishment.”
Given the geographical jurisdiction of the earlier Ninth Circuit over the Pacific coast and several Mountain states, the 2018 ruling had significant impact over the debate concerning homelessness in states such as California, which has an estimated 171,000 homeless people. Leaders in the states under the Ninth Circuit, such as California’s Governor Gavin Newsom, had used the earlier ruling to claim that they could not clear out the now-widespread homeless encampments.
The City of Grants Pass ruling will make it much easier for municipalities to clear homeless encampments from public places. Representative Kevin Kiley (R-CA) declared the ruling “a new day for California,” and said that this “can truly be a turning point for California.”
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