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Notes -
I'm working on a comment above that touches on this, but part of the appellant's argument was that enforcement was limited to homeless people and not regular people who happened to not be in strict compliance with the law. Hence Sotomayor's example of a guy who goes stargazing on a blanket and accidentally falls asleep. The Chief of Police admitted on the record that the law was only enforced against homeless people, and said such people wouldn't be arrested. That's where the whole "criminalizing status" argument came in, because it was a law that, as enforced, had the effect of making homelessness illegal in the city.
There's some messiness with it -- the state was able to respond to Sotomayor with a specific example of a citation "issued to a person with a home address" (pg 10, committed to a (state) necessity defense, and there's actually a mess of five different regulations only some of which got enjoined, and as progressives are prone to point out in other contexts sometimes a rational law only hits some people because they're the only ones violating it -- and the facial nature makes that even uglier.
But yeah, I think there's something on the edges that would make more sense, and probably be something the courts would be willing to enforce. The Eight Amendment doctrine just doesn't make sense for it.
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Well sure, but inadvertent violations of minor laws go unpunished relatively frequently. No doubt a non-homeless guy sleeping on a park bench because, say, it's next to the bar and he doesn't want to pay for an uber, would find himself facing a minor fine if caught.
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The cop would probably nudge him awake and say, "You can't sleep here," and the guy would go home. If the guy instead pulls out a tent and crawls inside to sleep there, he'll probably get told again to leave and, if he doesn't, arrested. This applies whether the guy is homeless or homed, there's no class distinction other than one of obstinate and probably repeat offending.
Sleeping in a park where sleeping is disallowed because you have nowhere else to sleep is no different than stealing fruit from a fruit stand because you have no other food. It's a crime, whether you're scruffy or clean-cut.
Luckily there are beds and food in jail, so the system works when we let it.
There's another distinction: If the guy has a home and is just being obstinate, he gets no defense. His lawyer wouldn't fight for his constitutional right to sleep in public; he'd just try to get the level of offense reduced or obtain probation-before-judgement. No left-wing organizations would be jumping to his defense (nor, obviously, right-wing). If he somehow nevertheless got to appeal, the Ninth Circuit would not find that criminalizing sleeping in public for someone who had a home was criminalizing a status. So the Ninth Circuit really was requiring special rights for the homeless.
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