Abstract
Prior to the Supreme Court’s 2024 decision in City of Grants Pass v. Johnson, legal advocates for the homeless used the status crimes doctrine to successfully argue in multiple cases that anti-homeless laws, which punish life-sustaining acts such as sleeping, camping, or eating in public, are unconstitutional. Under the status crimes doctrine, which comes from the Supreme Court’s 1962 interpretation of the Eighth Amendment’s Cruel and Unusual Punishment Clause in Robinson v. California, it is unconstitutional to punish individuals for having a status they may have contracted innocently or involuntarily. The Robinson Court struck down a law criminalizing the addiction of narcotics because it punished people for having the illness of addiction. In the decades since Robinson, many state and circuit courts have interpreted the status crimes doctrine to extend to laws which criminalize conduct that is involuntary and inextricably intertwined with a status. Courts, including the Ninth Circuit, have held unconstitutional some applications of anti-homeless laws prohibiting camping in public on the grounds that just as people generally cannot help their homelessness, they also cannot help that they need somewhere to sleep at night.
In Grants Pass, the Supreme Court reversed the Ninth Circuit’s holding that it was unlawful under Robinson for the city of Grants Pass, Oregon to punish the involuntarily homeless for using bedding supplies to sleep in public when they have no available shelter. The Court imposed a formalistic act-status distinction on its interpretation of Robinson, finding that the status crimes doctrine did not apply because the law criminalized the act of camping in public, not the mere status of being homeless. The majority further stated that it was practically impossible to analyze whether the conduct at issue was truly involuntary, and the legislature may have intended to remedy the homelessness crisis by passing such an ordinance. In her dissent, Justice Sotomayor argued that an act-status distinction may create a loophole for legislatures to exploit, whereby they can criminalize a status by wording their laws to punish conduct that stands in as a proxy for that status.
This Comment proposes a narrow interpretation of Grants Pass that can cover up this loophole by preserving the power of the status crimes doctrine to apply to more than challenges to the facial wording of a law. Grants Pass should be construed to only preclude the status crimes doctrine from applying when the involuntariness of a status, and of the criminalized conduct associated with that status, cannot be conclusively shown. The application of the status crimes doctrine should also allow for the legislative intent and practical effect of a law to be considered as factors courts may use to determine whether a law effectively criminalizes a status as applied, even if the law does not criminalize a status on its face.
Recommended Citation
Sabina Idriz,
Revisiting Robinson: How Courts Can Preserve the Status Crimes Doctrine After Grants Pass,
116
J. Crim. L. & Criminology
529
(2026).
https://scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu/jclc/vol116/iss2/4