Supreme Court… declares homeless people not protected from cruel and unusual punishment
As far as I can tell, this is a pretty significant misrepresentation of the ruling.
Johnson v. Grants Pass is a court case originally filed in 2018 that determined it is cruel and unusual punishment to arrest or ticket people for sleeping outside when they have no other safe place to go. The case started in Grants Pass, Oregon when the city began issuing tickets to people sleeping in public, even when there were not enough safe, accessible shelter beds.
The ruling from a lower court was that ticketing people for sleeping outside when they have no access to shelter constitutes cruel and unusual punishment, which the federal constitution prohibits. It looks like the Supreme Court decided took the opposite stance: that ticketing homeless people when there’s no shelter available is not cruel and unusual punishment.
This is nowhere near a blanket ruling that “homeless people are not protected from cruel and unusual punishment.” A comparison would be if a lower court said exposed toilets in jails constituted cruel and unusual punishment and the Supreme Court reversed. That’s not saying prisoners can now be subjected to cruel and unusual punishment of any kind. It’s saying that specific practice – providing only exposed toilets in jail cells – is not within the definition of cruel and unusual punishment.
This is obviously a bad ruling, but it is not anywhere near as bad as the headline claims. I don’t think we do ourselves any favors overstating the severity of issues – it’s The Boy Who Cried Wolf, and the situation is bad enough that the actual facts are all we need.
As far as I can tell, this is a pretty significant misrepresentation of the ruling.
The ruling from a lower court was that ticketing people for sleeping outside when they have no access to shelter constitutes cruel and unusual punishment, which the federal constitution prohibits. It looks like the Supreme Court decided took the opposite stance: that ticketing homeless people when there’s no shelter available is not cruel and unusual punishment.
This is nowhere near a blanket ruling that “homeless people are not protected from cruel and unusual punishment.” A comparison would be if a lower court said exposed toilets in jails constituted cruel and unusual punishment and the Supreme Court reversed. That’s not saying prisoners can now be subjected to cruel and unusual punishment of any kind. It’s saying that specific practice – providing only exposed toilets in jail cells – is not within the definition of cruel and unusual punishment.
This is obviously a bad ruling, but it is not anywhere near as bad as the headline claims. I don’t think we do ourselves any favors overstating the severity of issues – it’s The Boy Who Cried Wolf, and the situation is bad enough that the actual facts are all we need.
It’s actually overturning the court’s own ruling from 2019, not a lower court’s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_v._Boise
Technically they overturned both