Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/23pdf/23-175_19m2.pdf
Page Number: 62.0

18 

CITY OF GRANTS PASS v. JOHNSON 

SOTOMAYOR, J., dissenting 

shelters in Grants Pass where [she could] stay.”  Ibid. 

Another  homeless  individual  was  found  outside  a  non-
profit “in severe distress outside in the frigid air.”  Id., at 
109.  “[H]e could not breathe and he was experiencing acute 
pain,” and he “disclosed fear that he would be arrested and 
trespassed again for being outside.”  Ibid.  Another, Carri-
eLynn  Hill,  whose  story  you  read  earlier,  see supra,  at  7, 
was ticketed for “lying down on a friend’s mat” and “lying
down under a tarp to stay warm.”  App. 134.  She was “con-
stantly afraid” of being “cited and arrested for being outside
in  Grants  Pass.”  Ibid.  She  is  unable  to  stay  at  the  only 
shelter in the City because she cannot keep her nebulizer,
which she needs throughout the night, in her room.  So she 
does  “not  know  of  anywhere  in  the  city  of  Grants  Pass 
where [she] can safely sleep or rest without being arrested, 
trespassed, or moved along.”  Id., at 135.  As she put it: “The
only way I have figured out how to get by is try to stay out
of sight and out of mind.”  Ibid.  Stories like these fill the 
record and confirm the City’s success in targeting the status
of being homeless.

The majority proclaims, with no citation, that “it makes
no difference whether the charged defendant is homeless, a
backpacker on vacation passing through town, or a student 
who abandons his dorm room to camp out in protest.”  Ante, 
at 20.  That describes a fantasy.  In reality, the deputy chief 
of police operations acknowledged that he was not aware of
“any  non-homeless  person  ever  getting  a  ticket  for  illegal
camping in Grants Pass.”  Tr. of Jim Hamilton in Blake v. 
Grants  Pass,  No.  1:18–cr–01823  (D  Ore.,  Oct.  16,  2019),
ECF Doc. 63–4, p. 16.  Officers testified that “laying on a 
blanket  enjoying  the  park”  would  not  violate  the  ordi-
nances, ECF Doc. 63–7, at 2; and that bringing a sleeping 
bag to “look at stars” would not be punished, ECF Doc. 63–
5, at 5.  Instead, someone violates the Ordinance only if he 
or she does not “have another home to go to.”  Id., at 6.  That 
is the definition of being homeless.  The majority does not