Ninth Circuit: Ruling Blocking Removal of Homeless Camps Allowed to Stand

On July 5th, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals refused a request for en-banc review of Johnson v. City of Grants Pass,  a ruling which voided local ordinances allowing the city  to clear out homeless camps on public property.   In the Johnson ruling announced last September, a divided panel of the court expanded an earlier Ninth Circuit ruling (Martin v. City of Boise) which discovered that the homeless have a constitutional right to camp in parks and on sidewalks.   As reported in the Anchorage Daily News, the full court’s refusal to reconsider that holding was met with an unusually harsh dissent by 16 Ninth Circuit judges.  Among the dissenters Senior Judge Diarmuid O’Scannlian noted that no other federal court of appeals has discovered a constitutional right to sleep or camp on sidewalks and other public property.  The Eighth Amendment is “not a boundless remedy for all social and policy ills, including homelessness. It does not empower us to displace state and local decisionmakers with our own enlightened view of how to address a public crisis over which we can claim neither expertise nor authority, and it certainly does not authorize us to dictate municipal policy here,” he wrote.  The City of Grants Pass plans to petition the U.S. Supreme Court to hear its appeal of the Johnson ruling.