Santa Ana’s Anti-Camping Law Overturned : Courts: Appeals justices say measure aimed at clearing Civic Center of homeless is unconstitutional, would ‘destroy liberty.’

Saying that the homeless of Santa Ana were essentially being told to “clear out of town by sunset,” a tartly worded appeals court ruling struck down as unconstitutional the city’s anti-camping ordinance.

If the ordinance were allowed to stand, it “would turn the county jail into a poorhouse and thus . . . destroy liberty,” the court said. “Punishment for poverty--which the camping ordinance surely is--is cruel and unusual punishment.”

The 4th District Court of Appeal here also found that the city’s 1992 ordinance prohibiting the homeless from camping on public property is vague and bars people from being able to live and move based on class.

Advocates for the homeless in California and in major cities including Baltimore and Miami have been closely following the legal battle over the ordinance.

Criminal charges against at least a dozen homeless people cited for violating the Santa Ana ordinance were dropped because of the appellate court decision.

“The court of appeals has said very plainly that the city cannot drive the homeless out,” Harry Simon, a lawyer with the Legal Aid Society of Orange County, which challenged the ordinance, said Thursday.

Santa Ana Assistant City Atty. Robert Wheeler said city officials are “disappointed” in the decision, which was released late Wednesday, and will appeal to the California Supreme Court.

“The ordinance was adopted at a time when things were really out of hand in the Civic Center plaza” in mid-1992, Wheeler said. “It was a tent city (of homeless people). Yet that didn’t come out in the court’s opinion.”

Santa Ana City Councilwoman Lisa Mills said that the court’s decision was not surprising but that the city must continue on its legal course.

“The Civic Center wasn’t meant to be a place to sleep,” Mills said. People “don’t feel safe going to the Civic Center anymore.”

The campaign prohibition went into effect in September, 1992, and soon afterward the Legal Aid Society filed suit in Superior Court. That court upheld the ordinance and Legal Aid appealed.

Last December, the city passed a second, separate anti-camping ordinance, patterned after a U.S. Park Service law, to clear the homeless from the Civic Center area only.

Simon asked Orange County Superior Court Judge Robert J. Polis to temporarily block police from enforcing that law in January, but Polis said the city’s second ordinance was likely to pass constitutional muster and allowed enforcement to begin.

However, advocates for the homeless still intend to challenge that second ordinance in a few months, Simon said.

Under the ordinance that was struck down in the appellate ruling, homeless people were essentially told to “clear out of town by sunset; and that, of course, is what this ordinance is all about, a blatant and unconstitutional infringement on the right to travel,” Justice Thomas F. Crosby Jr. wrote in the decision.

Crosby wrote that the city “claims denying petitioners the use of sleeping bags and blankets outdoors does not outlaw necessities of life because the homeless can sleep somewhere else. Where? Some of the homeless declarants did prefer the outdoors to an overcrowded armory, but none expressed a preference to living as a way of life in a Civic Center parking structure or doorway during the cold, rainy January evenings when they were cited. They had no better place to go than some public location.”

The court’s action was hailed by Christopher Mears, an attorney who has represented several Santa Ana homeless clients in civil and criminal cases.

The decision “makes you feel like you’re not alone, howling in the wilderness,” he said. “This whole program of criminalizing homelessness violates the Constitution . . . but unfortunately the city views the Constitution and enforcement of it as a game.”

But praise for the ruling wasn’t universal.

Robert Teir, general counsel for the American Alliance for Rights & Responsibilities in Washington, a group supporting the city’s efforts, said: “Winning this case and establishing a constitutional right to sleep in the public place of your choice . . . furthers the deterioration of cities and makes it uncomfortable for middle-class people to live in them.”