A lawsuit that began in Grants Pass in 2018 will be argued in front of the U.S. Supreme Court this month, potentially paving the way for nationwide changes in the ways cities address certain elements of the homelessness crisis.
Sitting at one of the counsel tables will be Ed Johnson, litigation director at The Oregon Law Center, a small legal nonprofit that filed the initial lawsuit against the southern Oregon town six years ago.
The suit, brought on behalf of all unhoused individuals in Grants Pass, claimed that it was unconstitutionally cruel and unusual punishment to cite and fine people for camping or sleeping outside if they had nowhere else to go.
Johnson, whose professional mission is to achieve justice for low-income Oregonians, will sit at the counsel table to support the Washington D.C.-based attorney who will argue Grants Pass v. Johnson in front of the country’s highest legal decision makers.
It will be Johnson’s first time back at the Supreme Court since he interned there as an undergraduate in the summer of 1989, giving hourly courtroom lectures and tours.
Johnson said he feels privileged to bring his clients’ voices to the highest court.
“The question is whether or not cities can make it illegal and criminally punishable for people to try to survive on public property 24 hours a day,” Johnson said. “Whatever the Supreme Court does will be the law of the land.”
GRANTS PASS AN OUTLIER
Dating back to 2013, Grants Pass officials brainstormed ways to push unhoused people out of their town, Johnson said. They discussed putting them in their old jail, creating an unwanted list, posting signs at the city border or driving people out of town, he said he learned from digging into historic City Council records.
Michael Riley, an attorney representing Grants Pass, said those suggestions were made by a former city councilor and do not represent the views of the current City Council or city officials.
“Grants Pass has made significant investments in supporting the members of its homeless community and its commitment to lifting them up has never wavered,” Riley said.
In court documents, lawyers for Grants Pass have argued that the city is obligated to protect the health and safety of its residents and that the lower courts’ “decisions stand in the way of solutions to this complex problem and harm the very people they were intended to help” by allowing individuals to remain on the street.
The attorneys cite another landmark decision, Martin v. Boise, a 9th Circuit Court ruling that found it unconstitutional to punish people for sleeping on the streets in the absence of alternative options. The attorneys argue “that decision exacerbated the homelessness crisis, prevented comprehensive and swift responses to encampments, and undermined the ‘core mandate for every municipality’ to ‘keep its public space safe and accessible to all its residents.’”
But Johnson contends that without enough shelter and housing, the threat of criminalization won’t push people to safer places.
“Grants Pass has always been an outlier in terms of enforcement,” Johnson said. “No cities are allowed to do what Grants Pass is trying to convince the Supreme Court they are allowed to do.”
Ed Johnson, litigation director at The Oregon Law Center, will be sitting at one of the counsel tables at the U.S. Supreme Court. It will be Johnson’s first time back at the Supreme Court since he interned there as an undergraduate in the summer of 1989.Natalia Amari
Currently, officers patrol the city nearly every day, Johnson said, handing out citations to people who are camping or sleeping on public property or for having too many belongings with them. Attorneys for Grants Pass wrote in court documents that the city generally issued fewer than 100 citations per year to campers from 2013 to 2018.
Johnson said Oregon cities are allowed to prohibit tents, regulate encampments and perform sweeps. Cities are allowed to sweep tents with 72 hours’ notice, he said. What they can’t do is ticket, fine or jail people for living outside, which Grants Pass has done, Johnson said.
“What harms people is the hunting down in the middle of the night and putting in jail people who are trying to survive,” he said. “If we go down this road of criminalization, we will waste a lot of money.”
In 2020, the federal district court in Medford ruled the city’s actions against its unhoused residents were unconstitutional. In 2022, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals agreed. So, the city appealed to the Supreme Court, which agreed early this year to hear the case.
Currently there are a handful of shelters in Grants Pass but nowhere near enough to serve the nearly 600 people experiencing homelessness within the city lines, Johnson said. If there were shelters people in Grants Pass could access, the city wouldn’t necessarily be violating people’s constitutional rights, Johnson said.
The case began when a woman named Gloria Johnson, whose name is in the title of the lawsuit and has no relation to Ed Johnson, was repeatedly cited by Grants Pass police.
POOR, DISABLED, ‘NOT SUPPOSED TO BE THERE’
Laura Gutowski, 55, who is part of the class action suit, has been experiencing homelessness in Grants Pass for just under three years. After her husband passed away in 2021, she could no longer afford housing with just her monthly disability check.
She first stayed in her car for about eight months, then slept in a tent under a gazebo at one of the city’s parks and briefly stayed at a shelter. She now lives in a tent in a different city park. She’s received multiple citations for camping, once twice in a single day and once upon being discharged from a local hospital.
“I’m usually cited for camping when I am in the park when I’m not supposed to be there,” she said. “But I am disabled so I need help moving to a different place each day.”
Gutowski says she has a range of physical disabilities that plague her with discomfort and pain. She has osteoarthritis, a floating patella, bone on bone splintering, degenerative disks in her spine, diabetes, emphysema and severe depression and anxiety, she said.
Kat has been houseless for two years in Grants Pass and is close with Laura Gutowski, 55, who is also part of the class action suit. Kat views Gutowski as a mother figure on the street and refers to her as a "mama bear." Every Monday and Wednesday, police force people to relocate to a different park or area of the city, Kat said.Cate Battles
In 2017, the Oregon Law Center learned police officers were waking up sleeping campers to issue them $295 tickets, Johnson said. It wasn’t the first time the city tried to make their public spaces unwelcoming for those struggling to find housing, Johnson said.
Riley said the city only enforces the camping ban during the day and only after multiple warnings.
As Gutowski’s many tickets go unpaid, they double in price. She has no money to pay the thousands of dollars in accumulated fines, and her account has been sent to a collections agency, which in turn harmed her credit score, she said.
Gutowski also received at least four $265 citations for trash accumulation because she had an enclosed bag of cans and a bucket of rubbish outside her tent, she said. Grants Pass officials did not respond to questions about their trash citation policies.
Riley said local judges often will reduce the fines if the individual appears in court.
This past year, Gutowski was approved for a housing voucher worth $889 a month. She had four months to find a livable home in that price range. There were few options at that cost, and landlords declined her application due to her low credit score.
As the four month deadline neared, Gutowski landed in the hospital and her chance at housing disappeared.
She’s now back to surviving in a tent while answering phone calls about how the Supreme Court decision may impact her.
For Johnson, the attention he and the nonprofit law center are receiving is a first.
“As a legal aid lawyer in Oregon, my most common experience is no one being particularly interested in what I was doing for years,” he said. “This has been a completely new experience for me.”
Johnson began as a lawyer at a big New York City law firm right out of Columbia University Law School. But after three years, he moved in Oregon in 1996 and became an AmeriCorps attorney in Portland. During his first year, it became clear to him that legal aid work was his passion.
“My favorite part is not that we are the voice for the voiceless, our clients have great voices,” Johnson said. “But we facilitate bringing those voices into the justice system. Our clients are unbelievably courageous … and they believe the system could work better.”
Nicole Hayden writes about homelessness for The Oregonian/OregonLive. She can be reached at nhayden@oregonian.com.