The Oregon case decided Friday is the most significant to come before the high court in decades on the issue and comes as a rising number of people in the U.S. are without a permanent place to live.
The Oregon case decided Friday is the most significant to come before the high court in decades on the issue and comes as a rising number of people in the U.S. are without a permanent place to live.
SCOTUS has absolutely set realist standards in the past. For example, gun regulations that are de facto bans are treated as such and declared unconstitutional.
They absolutely do not have to sit back and consign homeless people to the prison debt system while bemoaning their inability to enforce the 8th amendment.
The issue is the 8A is understood to have refered to the punishments being cruel or unusual, per the Court, not the offense. The actual punishments here (fine, court order, or 30 days in jail) are fairly normal for laws, the only odd thing about the statute is what the “crime” is.
The court chose that narrow view. They chose to naively interpret the punishment as ending and not transitioning into new forms that can dog people the rest of their lives. It is not something they were required to do. As the dissent points out.