Johnson v. City of Dallas

• Decision Date: 18 August 1994
• Docket Number: Civ. A. No. 3:94-CV-991-X.
• Citation: 860 F. Supp. 344
• Parties: Prince JOHNSON, et al., Plaintiffs, v. CITY OF DALLAS, et al., Defendants.
• Court: U.S. District Court — Northern District of Texas

860 F. Supp. 344

Prince JOHNSON, et al., Plaintiffs, v. CITY OF DALLAS, et al., Defendants.

Civ. A. No. 3:94-CV-991-X.

United States District Court, N.D. Texas, Dallas Division.

August 18, 1994.

Steven Peter Anderson, Mills Presby & Anderson, Dallas, TX, Jeffie Janette Massey, Law Office of Jeffie J. Massey, Dallas, TX, for plaintiffs.

Sam A. Lindsay, Dallas City Attorney's Office, Dallas, TX, for defendants.

Darrell E. Jordan, Hughes & Luce, Dallas, TX, for Central Dallas Ass'n, amicus curiae, Cedars Ass'n, amicus curiae, Deep Ellum Ass'n, amicus curiae, State-Thomas Homeowners Ass'n, amicus curiae, West End Ass'n, amicus curiae.

Kerry L. Adams, Jennifer M. Hall, Howrey & Simon, Washington, DC, Maria Foscarinis, National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty, Washington, DC, for National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty, amicus curiae.

MEMORANDUM OPINION AND ORDER

KENDALL, District Judge.

NOW before the Court are Plaintiffs' Application for Temporary Injunction, filed on May 18, 1994, and the responses of Defendants and Amici. Having considered these filed materials, as well as the arguments of counsel and evidence adduced at the hearing held on June 2, 1994, the Court concludes that Plaintiffs' application should be GRANTED in part and DENIED in part. For the reasons set forth below, the Court concludes that, as applied, the sleeping in public ordinance does not comport with constitutional standards. However, the Court fails to discern constitutional infirmities in the remaining statute and city ordinances, either facially or as applied. To the extent that the Court's prior orders are inconsistent with this opinion, they are hereby vacated.

I.

This case concerns the constitutionality of various city ordinances enacted, enforced or both, allegedly to remove homeless persons from public view in the city of Dallas and a state statute allegedly enforced for that purpose. Plaintiffs are themselves homeless, and they seek to represent a class of homeless persons. Defendants include the City of Dallas, the Dallas Police Department and members of the Dallas City Council. Plaintiffs attack, among other things, a city ordinance that would prohibit sleeping in public as well as the proposed eviction under the state criminal trespass statute of a homeless encampment under certain interstate highway bridges on the east side of Dallas' central business district. After a hearing on May 20, 1994, the Court granted Plaintiffs' application for a temporary restraining order, which prevented the City from enforcing certain ordinances and evicting persons living under the bridges, and scheduled a hearing for June 2 on Plaintiffs' motion for preliminary injunction. The Court hereby memorializes its ruling on the instant issues, which was rendered in a more summary fashion by order entered on June 2, 155 F.R.D. 581.¹

II.

Although Plaintiffs look to the Eighth Amendment² for primary support in their onslaught against the city ordinances and the state criminal trespass statute, the Supreme Court's decision in Robinson v. California, 370 U.S. 660, 82 S.Ct. 1417, 8 L.Ed.2d 758 (1962), which interpreted the Eighth Amendment as applied through the Fourteenth, is the animating force of their contentions. In Robinson, the Court considered a California statute making it a criminal offense for a person to "be addicted to the use of narcotics." Id. At Robinson's trial, the judge instructed the jury that the California statute made it unlawful

either to use narcotics, or to be addicted to the use of narcotics.... That portion of the statute referring to the "use" of narcotics is based upon the "act" of using. That portion of the statute referring to "addicted to the use" of narcotics is based upon a condition or status. They are not identical.... To be addicted to the use of narcotics is said to be a status or condition and not an act. It is a continuing offense and differs from most other offenses in the fact that it is chronic rather than acute; that it continues after it is complete and subjects the offender to arrest at any time before he reforms. The existence of such a chronic condition may be ascertained from a single examination, if the characteristic reactions of that condition be found present.

Id. at 662-63, 82 S.Ct. at 1418. Noting that the Court was required to take the statute as the state court read it, the Court recognized the problematic attending the criminalizing of mere status:

It is unlikely that any State at this moment in history would attempt to make it a criminal offense for a person to be mentally ill, or a leper, or to be afflicted with a venereal disease. A State might determine that the general health and welfare require that the victims of these and other human afflictions be dealt with by compulsory treatment, involving quarantine, confinement, or sequestration. But, in the light of contemporary human knowledge, a law which made a criminal offense of such a disease would doubtless be universally thought to be an infliction of cruel and unusual punishment in violation of the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments.

We cannot but consider the statute before us as of the same category.

Id. at 666-67, 82 S.Ct. at 1420 (citation omitted). That addiction is an analogue to certain sicknesses occupied a prominent position in the Court's logic, and buttressed its holding:

We hold that a state law which imprisons a person thus afflicted as a criminal, even though he has never touched any narcotic drug within the State or been guilty of any irregular behavior there, inflicts a cruel and unusual punishment in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment. To be sure, imprisonment for ninety days is not, in the abstract, a punishment which is either cruel or unusual. But the question cannot be considered in the abstract. Even one day in prison would be a cruel and unusual punishment for the "crime" of having a common cold.

Id. at 667, 82 S.Ct. at 1420-21. Justice White, whose views discussed below on the issue of "status" become important to Plaintiffs' assertions, began his dissent in Robinson, as follows: "If appellant's conviction rested upon sheer status, condition or illness or if he was convicted for being an addict who had lost his power of self-control, I would have other thoughts about this case. But this record presents neither situation." Id. at 685, 82 S.Ct. at 1430 (White, J., dissenting).

In Powell v. Texas, 392 U.S. 514, 88 S.Ct. 2145, 20 L.Ed.2d 1254 (1968), the defendant argued that an affinity between the facts of his case and those of Robinson compelled the overturning of his conviction. The Powell Court considered a Texas statute, which stated the following: "Whoever shall get drunk or be found in a state of intoxication in any public place, or at any private house except his own, shall be fined not exceeding one hundred dollars." Id. at 517, 88 S.Ct. at 2146. Powell had been arrested and charged under this statute with being found in a state of intoxication in a public place; he was convicted and fined $20. At his trial, his lawyer argued that he was "afflicted with the disease of chronic alcoholism, that his appearance in public while drunk was ... not of his own volition, and therefore that to punish him criminally for that conduct would be cruel and unusual, in violation of the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution." Id. (internal quotation marks omitted).

After an extended dissertation on the dearth of professional consensus concerning the nature and causes of alcoholism, the court turned to Robinson, and distinguished that earlier case in these terms:

On its face the present case does not fall within Robinson's holding, since appellant was convicted, not for being a chronic alcoholic, but for being in public while drunk on a particular occasion. The State of Texas thus has not sought to punish a mere status, as California did in Robinson .... Rather, it has imposed upon appellant a criminal sanction for public behavior which may create substantial health and safety hazards, both for appellant and for members of the general public, and which offends the moral and esthetic sensibilities of a large segment of the community. This seems a far cry from convicting one for being an addict, being a chronic alcoholic, being "mentally ill, or a leper...." Robinson, 370 U.S. at 666, 82 S.Ct. at 1420.

Powell, 392 U.S. at 532, 88 S.Ct. at 2154. The Court was chary of announcing an "important and wide-ranging new constitutional principle," id. at 521, 88 S.Ct. at 2149, on the facts of Powell. This cabined reading of Robinson stemmed at least in part from the Court's fear of supplanting with constitutional analysis traditional notions of criminal culpability and state sovereignty:

And unless Robinson is so viewed it is difficult to see any limiting principle that would serve to prevent this Court from becoming, under the aegis of the Cruel and Unusual Punishment Clause, the ultimate arbiter of the standards of criminal responsibility, in diverse areas of the criminal law, throughout the country.

Powell, 392 U.S. at 533, 88 S.Ct. at 2154. Later, the Court noted that "traditional common-law concepts of personal accountability and essential considerations of federalism lead us to disagree with appellant." Id. at 535, 88 S.Ct. at 2155. Justice Black glossed the holding of Robinson thus:

The rule of constitutional law urged by appellant is not required by Robinson. In that case we held that a person could not be punished for the mere status of being a narcotics addict. We explicitly limited our holding to the situation where no conduct of any kind is involved.... The argument is made that appellant comes within the terms of our holding in Robinson because being drunk in public is a mere status or "condition." Despite this many-faceted use of the concept of "condition," this argument would require converting Robinson into a case protecting actual behavior, a step we

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