Ruling Sides With Homeless

When darkness falls on downtown Santa Ana, homeless people like Robert G. Byrum often slip into the shadows for their night’s sleep--huddled between bushes, behind alley dumpsters and below staircases.

They hide because a city ordinance prohibits people from sleeping on public property, one of dozens of anti-camping laws nationwide aimed at cracking down on the homeless.

“If you get tired, you get tired,” said Byrum, a 48-year-old diabetic and veteran of the downtown streets. “I’ll sleep anywhere I can find to lay down. I’ve slept on bus benches . . . in parking lots.”

But a ruling by a state appellate court has given Byrum and other transients a new tool to fight what has become one of the most effective methods that cities use to push homeless people out of public places.

The court recently threw out the conviction of a Santa Ana homeless man who was cited for sleeping in the Santa Ana Civic Center, saying he should have been allowed to use his lack of shelter as a defense.

The ruling didn’t strike down such laws. But legal experts said it offers a stronger defense against ordinances across California that criminalize the behavior of homeless people.

“It recognizes a principle of law that has existed for hundreds of years: People should not be held criminally accountable for things that they have no choice about,” said Gary Blasi, a law professor at UCLA. “If the homeless shelters are full, your choices are basically to trespass, or be on public property, or levitate off the surface of the Earth. You have to be someplace.”

The decision, which can be cited as a precedent, is already causing concern among some community leaders and residents, who fear weakened anti-camping laws could mean a return to the homeless problem that plagued cities from Santa Ana to Santa Monica in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Santa Ana’s landmark 1992 anti-camping ordinance was one of the first in the state, and its early success prompted other cities--including Laguna Beach, Santa Barbara and West Hollywood--to pass similar laws. Berkeley in December became the latest city to prohibit lying down on sidewalks, prompted by merchants’ complaints about homeless people harassing shoppers.

In many cases, the laws have succeeded in pushing homeless people from public view or restricting them to certain areas of cities.

Santa Ana’s Civic Center plaza, for example, was once lined with makeshift homeless encampments that came to symbolize the downtown area’s decline. But since the anti-camping law was adopted, the encampments have all but disappeared from the plaza--to the delight of residents.

“It’s been a huge change for the better in the environment downtown,” said Tim Rush, president of a Santa Ana neighborhood association. “Before, you had to carry a stick to beat these people off of you.”

Rush and others worry that the ruling “has the potential to dramatically alter the progress that Santa Ana has made,” he said. “While homeless people don’t make up a great deal of the criminal element, they have a huge impact on the perception of safety and crime.”

But a few blocks away at the Rescue Mission, homeless people take a different view. Many said they are often kicked awake by police and given tickets for sleeping in parks. One 41-year-old man at the shelter, who asked not to be identified, said he has gotten around the law by sleeping in a friend’s car for friend’s car for much of the five weeks since he lost his job.

“It’s getting to the point where it’s going to be against the law to be homeless,” he said.

The 4th District Court of Appeal ruling, published last month, involves James Warner Eichorn, an unemployed Vietnam veteran who was ticketed in 1993 for dozing in his sleeping bag on public property.

The justices overturned a ruling by an Orange County Municipal Court judge who said Eichorn violated the anti-camping ordinance and suggested he had options besides sleeping in the plaza.

“Couldn’t your client have found a nice little warm, covered stairwell on private property to sleep?” Judge James M. Brooks asked Eichorn’s attorneys during the trial. “Is [it] a reasonable alternative, just going to a nearby city, walking a mile or so? . . . Stroll on a nice sunny day, find a cushy spot in Tustin, in a city park and make his home there.”

But the appellate court ruling rejected Brooks’ thinking, saying Santa Ana could not “solve” its social problems by foisting them onto nearby communities. It ruled that the judge should have allowed Eichorn to offer proof that every shelter bed in the city that night was taken, and that he was too poor to afford housing.

The justices noted that all of Santa Ana’s approximately 300 emergency shelter beds were taken the night Eichorn was cited. An expert during the trial estimated the city’s homeless population at 1,500.

Legal experts said the ruling provides homeless people with a so-called “necessity defense” against the anti-camping ordinances, which could be successfully challenged if communities don’t provide enough alternatives.

Under the necessity defense, one would argue that sleeping in a public area is necessary--and legal--if a community does not provide viable alternatives.

James Lafferty, executive director of the National Lawyers Guild of Los Angeles, said some cities--notably Santa Monica--have added shelter beds in recent years in an effort to provide homeless people with realistic options.

Still, “there’s no city in [Los Angeles] county that I know of that has done so much for homeless that they are immune to a necessity defense,” he said.

Legal challenges to anti-camping laws have resulted in some cities seeking alternative approaches, as well as beefing up services for the homeless. In Miami, for example, the city agreed to an out-of-court settlement with homeless advocates that included sensitivity training for police. The city also approved a 1% tax on restaurant meals to help fund services for homeless people.

Santa Ana’s ordinance makes it a crime punishable by as much as six months in jail to use a sleeping bag or blanket or to store personal effects on public property.

The law made national headlines and was aggressively used by police to remove the 200 or so homeless people who camped out in the Civic Center.

Santa Ana officials said the number of people ticketed has declined in recent years, to about 10 per month. The district attorney’s office has said it will not appeal the ruling, and Assistant City Atty. Ben Kaufman said it will not alter the city’s policy. Transients, he said, are cited only if police officers determine that they have not fully explored alternatives to sleeping on public property.

Kaufman noted that on the night Eichorn was ticketed, he had not checked to see if any shelter beds were available.

But homeless advocates question police tactics and say the case points up the need for more affordable housing and emergency shelters.