I have an article in the Wall Street Journal about the homelessness case, Grants Pass v. Johnson, which is being argued in the Supreme Court this morning. Here's an excerpt:
Johnson v. Grants Pass (2022), and another Ninth Circuit ruling, Martin v. Boise (2018), declared it unconstitutional to arrest people for camping on sidewalks if a city’s homeless population exceeds the number of beds available in its homeless shelters. The appeals court’s reasoning went like this: Supreme Court precedent says it’s “cruel and unusual” to punish someone for doing something he can’t help doing, and if there aren’t shelter beds available, then anyone who sleeps on the streets or public parks is doing so “involuntarily.”
That makes no sense. A person who drives drunk and crashes his car can’t claim he acted “involuntarily” because the city didn’t arrange an Uber ride for him. If a poor person mugs a passerby to get money for food, he can’t plead not guilty on the theory that the government’s failure to give him a meal makes his crime “involuntary.”
The court’s bizarre theory of “voluntariness”—in which, as a Journal editorial pointed out, the court “divined in the Constitution a right to public vagrancy”—ignores individual circumstances. And it risks automatically deeming much of the homeless population immune from arrest based on a one-size-fits-all formula found nowhere in the Constitution.
Comments policy