State Justices Uphold Tough Homeless Law : Court: Santa Ana measure bans use of sleeping bag or blanket on public property. Other cities may follow suit.

The California Supreme Court on Monday upheld a sweeping Santa Ana homeless ordinance, ruling that cities may prosecute people for using a sleeping bag or blanket on public property.

On a 6-1 vote, the court held that Santa Ana’s 1992 law, one of the toughest in the nation, does not violate the constitutional rights of the homeless. The ruling overturns a lower court decision that the law posed cruel and unusual punishment.

Monday’s decision, the first on a homeless ordinance by any state supreme court, gives cities across California a strong boost in their efforts to control people who live on the streets. Advocates for the poor glumly predicted that more cities will pass similar laws to eject the homeless.

“It is an absolute, clear-cut victory for the city in all respects,” said Robert J. Wheeler, Santa Ana assistant city attorney. “I really think it is so critically important that it has nationwide implications.”

The Santa Ana law makes it a crime punishable by up to six months in jail to use a sleeping bag or blanket or to store personal effects on public sidewalks, streets, parking lots and government malls. Dozens of people were cited under the law before a Court of Appeal blocked its enforcement.

The Clinton Administration’s Justice Department sided with homeless advocates in the case, filing a friend-of-the-court brief against the ordinance. One of the advocates’ lawyers said they may ask the U.S. Supreme Court to review the ruling.

“We think it criminalizes homelessness,” said Harry Simon, staff lawyer for the Legal Aid Society of Santa Ana. “I think it sends a message to cities that as far as the California courts are concerned, they can do whatever they want.”

The high court found that Santa Ana’s law can be applied without violating any constitutional rights. “There is no right to use public property for living accommodations or for storage of personal possessions,” wrote Justice Marvin Baxter for the majority, “except insofar as the government permits such use by ordinance or regulation.”

The majority said the law’s challengers had failed to mount an effective case against the way the ordinance has been applied and concluded that the evidence did not suggest illegal enforcement.

But Justice Stanley Mosk, in a written dissent, accused the majority of sidestepping thorny legal issues and erecting procedural barriers that will make future challenges difficult.

“Although a city may reasonably control the use of its parks and other public areas,” Mosk wrote, “it cannot constitutionally enact and enforce an ordinance so sweeping that it literally prevents indigent homeless citizens from residing within its boundaries.

“The city cannot solve its ‘homeless problem’ simply by exiling large numbers of its homeless citizens to neighboring localities,” Mosk wrote.

After the Court of Appeal in Santa Ana blocked the law, the city passed a second ordinance prohibiting camping in its civic center complex. Wheeler said that law has reduced the city’s homeless problem, and officials will enforce the more sweeping ordinance only if needed.

Fewer homeless now congregate in Santa Ana “because nobody wants to go to jail,” said defense attorney Kevin Phillips, who represented some of the homeless people cited under the first ordinance.

He said he expects Santa Ana to reinstate prosecutions against those who were cited. “I guess they’ll find a home for them in jail instead,” Phillips said.

Orange County Senior Deputy Dist. Atty. E. Thomas Dunn Jr. confirmed that his office would complete the prosecutions. Although the Supreme Court allows necessity as a defense against the law, such defenses are difficult to make, Dunn said.

“In truth,” he said, “most people who are cited with this type of ordinance violation don’t violate the ordinance out of necessity. These are people who have subsistence money available to them and other options (that) they chose not to pursue.”

The Santa Ana law had been challenged on the grounds that it violated the right to travel, punished people on the basis of their status and was unconstitutionally vague. The court majority rejected all of those arguments.

Government does not have the duty in most cases to provide citizens with the means to enjoy a constitutional right, the court said.

“Santa Ana has no constitutional obligation to make accommodations on or in public property available to the transient homeless to facilitate their exercise of the right to travel,” Baxter wrote.

The court said the law was not unconstitutionally vague, citing language that the purpose of the law was to make public streets and other areas accessible to the public. Santa Ana city officials had argued that homeless people were creating a stench in public places.

“No reasonable person,” the majority said, “would believe that a picnic in an area designated for picnics would constitute camping in violation of the ordinance.”

Homeless advocates say Santa Ana has only 322 shelter beds for about 3,000 homeless. The entire county has about 975 beds for about 12,000 to 15,000 homeless people, they say.

But Dunn argued that these figures include people who have money to pay prostitutes or buy drugs and just prefer to live outdoors. “It is not that they don’t have money,” he said. “They just choose to spend it in other ways.”

The ruling is expected to help other cities whose ordinances have been challenged in court. Santa Monica City Atty. Marsha Moutrie said homeless advocates filed suit against Santa Monica’s homeless law, citing some of the same arguments that the Supreme Court rejected in the Santa Ana case.

“It sounds like the decision probably will help us (in) defending the lawsuit,” she said.