In the Grants Pass v. Johnson Supreme Court ruling, decided 6–3 on June 28, 2024, the Court held that cities may enforce anti-camping and anti-sleeping ordinances against homeless people even when shelter beds are unavailable. The majority concluded that punishing someone for sleeping outside is not cruel and unusual punishment under the Eighth Amendment. The decision overturned a line of Ninth Circuit precedent that had blocked such enforcement across nine western states and returned homelessness policy to local officials.
What the Grants Pass Ordinances Do
Grants Pass is a small city in southern Oregon. Its municipal code prohibits sleeping on public sidewalks, streets, and alleyways at any time, bans camping on any publicly owned property, and separately outlaws camping inside city parks.
The definition of “campsite” is broad. It covers any place where bedding, a sleeping bag, or other material used for bedding is placed to maintain a temporary place to live. Wrapping yourself in a blanket for warmth in a park can fall inside that definition.
Penalties climb with each violation. A first offense triggers a civil fine starting at $295. More than two citations within a year can produce an exclusion order barring the person from city parks for 30 days.1Supreme Court of the United States. City of Grants Pass v Johnson Violating that exclusion order is second-degree criminal trespass, a Class C misdemeanor in Oregon punishable by up to 30 days in jail and a fine of up to $1,250.2Oregon State Legislature. Oregon Revised Statutes 161.615 – Maximum Terms of Imprisonment for Misdemeanors
Two homeless residents of Grants Pass, Gloria Johnson and John Logan, filed a class-action lawsuit challenging these ordinances. The district court certified the class and issued an injunction blocking enforcement. A divided Ninth Circuit panel affirmed. Grants Pass petitioned the Supreme Court, and the Court took the case.
The Eighth Amendment Question
The Eighth Amendment prohibits “cruel and unusual punishments.”3Constitution Annotated. US Constitution – Eighth Amendment The plaintiffs’ argument built on Robinson v. California, a 1962 case in which the Supreme Court struck down a state law making it a crime to be addicted to narcotics. Robinson held that a state can punish drug possession or use, but not the bare status of being an addict.4Justia. Robinson v California, 370 US 660 (1962)
The plaintiffs extended that logic: for someone who cannot access shelter, homelessness is involuntary. Sleep is a biological necessity. If no bed is available, sleep will happen outside. Punishing that conduct, they argued, is functionally punishing the status of being homeless.
The Ninth Circuit had accepted that reasoning first in Martin v. City of Boise (2018), which held that when a city has more homeless residents than shelter beds, the Eighth Amendment bars prosecuting them for sleeping outdoors on public property.5United States Courts. Martin v City of Boise Martin effectively required cities across the western United States to demonstrate shelter availability before citing anyone for sleeping outside. It was the framework the Supreme Court dismantled.
The Majority Opinion
Justice Gorsuch wrote for the majority, joined by Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Thomas, Alito, Kavanaugh, and Barrett. The opinion drew a firm line between status and conduct and placed the Grants Pass ordinances on the conduct side.
The laws applied to everyone. Anyone who set up a campsite in a Grants Pass park, housed or unhoused, faced the same penalty. The ordinances did not make homelessness itself illegal; they targeted specific actions.1Supreme Court of the United States. City of Grants Pass v Johnson
The penalties, in the majority’s view, were neither cruel nor unusual. Civil fines and short jail terms for minor offenses are standard tools nationwide and bear no resemblance to the historical punishments the Eighth Amendment was designed to forbid, such as torture and methods meant to inflict terror.1Supreme Court of the United States. City of Grants Pass v Johnson
Gorsuch also narrowed Robinson. That case, he wrote, prevents the government from making a status itself a crime. It does not prevent the government from regulating conduct associated with a status. Policy questions about housing, mental health services, and public safety belong to elected officials and local communities, not federal judges.
The Dissent
Justice Sotomayor dissented, joined by Justices Kagan and Jackson. She argued that the majority’s status-conduct distinction collapsed on the facts.6Oyez. City of Grants Pass v Johnson
Sleep is not optional. Every person must sleep, and when someone has no home and no shelter bed, sleep will happen outdoors. Under the Grants Pass ordinances, using any bedding, even a single blanket, is camping. A person who falls asleep on a park bench with a blanket over their shoulders has committed a violation. The dissent read that as punishing people for existing without shelter.
Sotomayor also noted that enforcement fell almost exclusively on homeless residents, not on housed people who happened to nap in a park. The neutral wording of the law, she said, masked its actual target. She warned that upholding the ordinances would push vulnerable people from jurisdiction to jurisdiction while stacking up fines and criminal records that make escaping homelessness harder.
What Protections Still Apply
The ruling did not eliminate every legal protection for homeless individuals. Two limits are worth knowing about.
First, the majority acknowledged that people charged under anti-camping ordinances may still raise the common-law necessity defense in criminal court. Oregon law allows the defense when a defendant shows they had no reasonable alternative to the charged conduct, and the opinion cited State v. Barrett for the idea that necessity might apply to illegal camping charges when the defendant truly had nowhere else to go.1Supreme Court of the United States. City of Grants Pass v Johnson This is much narrower than Martin‘s protection. Each defendant must raise and prove the defense individually, often without a lawyer.
Second, when cities clear encampments, the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments still constrain how they treat personal property. In Lavan v. City of Los Angeles, the Ninth Circuit held that the Fourth Amendment prohibits cities from seizing and immediately destroying the unabandoned belongings of homeless individuals. Leaving property temporarily to use a restroom, attend court, or look for food does not make it abandoned, and violating a camping ordinance does not forfeit constitutional rights to one’s belongings.7United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Lavan v City of Los Angeles Fourteenth Amendment due process also requires reasonable advance notice before a sweep and appropriate storage and retrieval procedures for collected property. Those protections were not before the Court in Grants Pass and survive it.
What the Ruling Means Now
The practical effect was immediate. Cities in the Ninth Circuit no longer had to demonstrate shelter availability before enforcing camping bans. Within months, several cities in Washington state removed shelter-offer requirements from their encampment laws, broadened the locations where bans apply, and increased penalties.
Cities outside the Ninth Circuit were affected too. They had never been formally bound by Martin, but many had hesitated to enforce camping bans aggressively while the constitutional question was open. The Supreme Court’s ruling resolved that uncertainty. Local governments now have clear authority to:
- Enforce anti-camping and anti-sleeping ordinances without first offering shelter beds.
- Use escalating penalties, including civil fines, park exclusion orders, and criminal trespass charges for repeat violations.
- Set time and location restrictions on public property, including full overnight bans in parks.
The ruling does not require cities to crack down on encampments. It removes the constitutional floor Martin had set. Some cities continue to offer shelter before enforcement, either by choice or because separate state or local laws require it. Others have moved sharply in the other direction. After Grants Pass, how a city responds to homelessness is a question of local politics rather than federal constitutional law.