Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/23pdf/23-175_19m2.pdf
Page Number: 3.0

Cite as:  603 U. S. ____ (2024) 

3 

Syllabus 

what a State may criminalize or how it may go about securing a con-
viction.  Like the Ninth Circuit in Martin, plaintiffs point to Robinson 
v. California, 370 U. S. 660, as a notable exception.  In Robinson, the 
Court  held  that  under  the  Cruel  and  Unusual  Punishments  Clause, 
California could not enforce a law providing that “‘[n]o person shall . . . 
be addicted to the use of narcotics.’”  Id., at 660, n 1.  While California 
could not make “the ‘status’ of narcotic addiction a criminal offense,” 
id., at 666, the Court emphasized that it did not mean to cast doubt on
the States’ “broad power” to prohibit behavior even by those, like the
defendant, who suffer from addiction.  Id., at 664, 667–668.  The prob-
lem, as the Court saw it, was that California’s law made the status of 
being an addict a crime.  Id., at 666–667  The Court read the Cruel and 
Unusual Punishments Clause (in a way unprecedented in 1962) to im-
pose a limit on what a State may criminalize.  In dissent, Justice White 
lamented that the majority had embraced an “application of ‘cruel and
unusual punishment’ so novel that” it could not possibly be “ascribe[d] 
to the Framers of the Constitution.”  370 U. S., at 689.  The Court has 
not applied Robinson in that way since. 

Whatever  its  persuasive  force  as  an  interpretation  of  the  Eighth 
Amendment, Robinson cannot sustain the Ninth Circuit’s Martin pro-
ject.    Robinson  expressly  recognized  the  “broad  power”  States  enjoy
over  the  substance  of  their  criminal  laws,  stressing  that  they  may
criminalize  knowing  or  intentional  drug  use  even  by  those  suffering 
from addiction.  370 U. S., at 664, 666.  The Court held that California’s 
statute offended the Eighth Amendment only because it criminalized
addiction as a status.  Ibid. 

Grants Pass’s public-camping ordinances do not criminalize status.
The public-camping laws prohibit actions undertaken by any person, 
regardless of status.  It makes no difference whether the charged de-
fendant is currently a person experiencing homelessness, a backpacker 
on vacation, or a student who abandons his dorm room to camp out in
protest on the lawn of a municipal building.  See Tr. of Oral Arg. 159. 
Because the public-camping laws in this case do not criminalize status, 
Robinson is not implicated.  Pp. 17–21. 

(c) Plaintiffs insist the Court should extend Robinson to prohibit the
enforcement of laws that proscribe certain acts that are in some sense
“involuntary,” because some homeless individuals cannot help but do 
what the law forbids.  See Brief for Respondents 24–25, 29, 32.  The 
Ninth Circuit pursued this line of thinking below and in Martin, but 
this  Court  already  rejected  it  in  Powell  v.  Texas,  392  U.  S.  514.  In 
Powell, the Court confronted a defendant who had been convicted un-
der a Texas statute making it a crime to “ ‘get drunk or be found in a 
state of intoxication in any public place.’ ”  Id., at 517 (plurality opin-
ion).  Like the plaintiffs here, Powell argued that his drunkenness was