(CN) — The city of Spokane, Washington maintains anti-camping laws which may violate the state constitution, according to homeless plaintiffs represented by the American Civil Liberties Union in a lawsuit filed Thursday.
In what may be the country’s first such legal challenge since the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in June that cities can enforce outdoor sleeping bans, homeless residents of Spokane said in their suit that the city’s ordinances are cruel and unusual punishments for people who sleep outside.
The named plaintiffs Donnell Currie, Clifford Moore and the nonprofit Jewels Helping Hands — filing in Spokane County Superior Court — challenge city ordinances that make camping, sitting or lying on public property misdemeanor crimes in some circumstances. A misdemeanor is punishable by a fine up to $1,000 or jail for up to 90 days in Washington.
“Simply put, because homelessness is not a crime, being subject to criminal penalties for acts that are inextricable from being homeless is cruel and such punishments are unconstitutional,” the plaintiffs say.
Spokane’s legal counsel Mike Piccolo, Mayor Lisa Brown and City Council President Betsy Wilkerson did not respond to requests for comment. It’s unclear whether Spokane has begun enforcing anti-camping ordinances by sweeping encampments of homeless residents following the high court’s ruling.
“We cannot arrest our way out of homelessness and poverty,” said La Rond Baker, legal director for the ACLU of Washington said in a statement. “Fines and incarceration only further entrench homelessness and separate people from essential support systems. If our state’s constitutional prohibition on cruel punishment means anything — it means that our poorest neighbors, those who lack a home, those who live and sleep outdoors — cannot be punished for being unhoused.”
Spokane, located in eastern Washington, is the state’s second most populous city and has around 230,000 residents. One of the city’s ordinances prohibits camping at all times within 50 feet of a railroad viaduct located downtown or within three blocks of a homeless shelter.
Voters in November also approved a ban on camping within 1,000 feet of a school, day care or park, alongside an existing ban on sitting or lying on sidewalks in the downtown area between 6 a.m. and midnight.
Currie and Moore are homeless, and the nonprofit provides services to homeless residents.
Currie recounted in the filing her experience being homeless and having to avoid shelters, due to her son’s inability to handle crowded settings and her fear of assaults and infectious disease. She said police cited her for unlawful camping in September 2023, and said she lived in a state of constant stress with little sleep during that period while relying on her vehicle for protection from the elements.
The plaintiffs said in the complaint that Spokane officials have this year prosecuted at least 114 cases of unlawful camping and sitting and lying violations, up from at least 107 cases in 2023.
They said the Washington state constitution specifically prohibits cruel punishment and thus provides more protection. Therefore, they claim that the city’s punishing people sleeping outside with fines and jail time violates the state constitution because prosecuting people for being homeless degrades their physical and mental health.
“And although their circumstances are born of poverty and our collective failure to invest in affordable housing, rather than address the core causes of homelessness, cities that punish the unhoused elect to stigmatize our poorest neighbors,” the plaintiffs added.
Other states with a constitution using similar language that prohibits cruel punishment without mentioning unusual punishment include Pennsylvania, Delaware, Rhode Island, Kentucky and South Dakota.
The ACLU and other affiliates have sued city officials in other states, claiming that local measures against homeless camping violated their constitutions. The ACLU of Hawaii and Honolulu recently agreed to dismiss a 2023 lawsuit the group had filed against the city’s homeless sweeps policy. The ACLU of Colorado is also awaiting trial on its claims in a 2022 lawsuit against the city of Boulder’s camping policy.
Homelessness in the U.S. grew 12% last year and is now at its highest reported level due to skyrocketing rents and little remaining pandemic assistance. In 2023, Washington had the nation’s fourth largest homeless population at more than 28,000 homeless residents. From 2022 to 2023, the number of homeless people in Spokane County jumped 36%, from 1,700 people to nearly 2,400.
Before the high court’s landmark decision — which found in June that such bans do not violate the U.S. Constitution’s Eighth Amendment prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment — cities were allowed to regulate encampments. But under the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeal’s ruling out of Boise, Idaho, officials couldn’t completely bar people from sleeping outdoors without enough available shelter beds.
Now, some cities in other states have begun enforcing anti-camping laws more aggressively than before. And despite California’s having nearly a third of the nation’s 650,000 homeless people, Governor Gavin Newsom last week ordered state agencies to begin removing tents on state land.