Is ticketing homeless people a cruel and unusual punishment?

IN 2013local leaders in Grants Pass, Oregon, held a meeting to brainstorm ideas for how to tackle the city’s growing “vagrancy problem”. A record of that meeting states that participants suggested “driving repeat offenders out of town and leaving them there”, and buying homeless people a bus ticket to anywhere else. “The point”, said Lily Morgan, a city-council member, “is to make it uncomfortable enough for them in our city so they will want to move on down the road.”The city, tucked between the Cascade and Siskiyou mountains north of the California border, banned sleeping and camping in public places. Over the next few years Ed Johnson, the director of litigation for the Oregon Law Centre, a legal charity, started to hear from homeless people in Grants Pass. They were woken by police, he recalls, slapped with fines they couldn’t pay and thrown in jail. In 2018 Mr Johnson sued the city on behalf of his homeless clients. On April 22nd the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in . The question at the heart of the case is whether penalising homeless people for sleeping outside when they have nowhere else to go counts as cruel and unusual punishment, which is banned by the Eighth Amendment.