OAKLAND, Calif. (CN) — San Francisco can dodge, for now, producing evidence in litigation challenging its removal of homeless people from city streets, while awaiting the Supreme Court’s opinion on the constitutional rights of those people.
U.S. Chief Magistrate Judge Donna Ryu ruled Friday to allow a stay in the city’s battle with a coalition of homeless people who say that its ban on people resting on public streets violates their civil rights. She said that the city has met its burden of proof for a five-month stay while the Supreme Court considers another case that questions how cities can enforce bans on camping on public property under the Eighth Amendment.
The city’s attorneys told Ryu in arguments on Feb. 8 that San Francisco's case depends on a ruling in Johnson v. Grants Pass, which revolves around whether cities are violating the Eighth Amendment by punishing homeless people for sleeping on public lands.
San Francisco officials said the high court’s ruling could affect how it handles the property of homeless people, claims from the plaintiffs that the removals violate due process rights — the requirement to make reasonable accommodations for people with disabilities — and whether sweeps of encampments unlawfully endanger people’s lives.
Ryu, in her 15-page order, agreed that a stay will prevent officials spending many hours producing potentially thousands of incident reports from within a two-year period, thousands of hours of body-worn camera footage and over 130,000 documents.
The plaintiffs told Ryu earlier this month that the Supreme Court’s case will have “little effect on the scope of discovery in this litigation” because the discovery and evidence relevant to their 12 claims “significantly overlap with discovery relevant to the Eighth Amendment claim.”
But Ryu said that the plaintiffs kept citing cases with different circumstances than the litigation at hand, and called their claims of state-created danger and violation of the California Constitution’s prohibition on cruel or unusual punishment “as yet, undeveloped.”
Ryu added that the plaintiffs “have not provided a clear delineation of their non-Eighth Amendment claims, and as such, they have not convinced the court that those claims require substantially the same breadth and scope of discovery relevant to the Eighth Amendment claim.”
As to the claim that a stay will harm the homeless people the coalition represents, Ryu said that her May 2023 order requires the city to follow multiple procedures when sweeping encampments: San Francisco must provide 72-hour advance notice of any planned sweeps and 24 hours’ notice before cleaning encampments, as well present regular data and incident reports to let the plaintiffs ensure compliance with her preliminary injunction.
Therefore, the judge said that plaintiffs’ concerns about monitoring the preliminary injunction during a stay are valid but can be mitigated with ongoing disclosures. She added that she hopes to mitigate any loss of evidence during the five-month stay, and said “There is no reason why the case should not move at a brisk pace toward trial following the stay.”
Nisha Kashyap, an attorney for Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area, said that the plaintiffs appreciate that Ryu rejected the city’s proposal to stop providing information about its encampment resolutions.
"We will continue to monitor the city’s compliance with the preliminary injunction, which remains in effect," Kashyap said. "This transparency is critical, since plaintiffs have identified numerous examples of the city violating the injunction."
Kashyap added that the plaintiffs do not think the Supreme Court's ruling will resolve claims that the city destroys homeless people’s property and fails to make reasonable accommodations for people with disabilities.
"We will be prepared this summer to continue our litigation and ensure that the city does not waste more tax dollars on dehumanizing unhoused people with costly and ineffective practices that will make it harder for people to exit homelessness," she said.
San Francisco City Attorney David Chiu said in a statement Friday that Ryu's decision will spare the city's resources.
“The Grants Pass decision underpins every aspect of plaintiffs’ case against the city and is the foundation of the preliminary injunction issued by the District Court," Chiu said. "Not a single argument against San Francisco can be untangled from Grants Pass. While this case is paused, San Francisco will continue to follow the preliminary injunction order and work hard to alleviate homelessness throughout the city.”
The judge ruled in 2022 that San Francisco officials cannot enforce "sit/lie" public sleeping laws against involuntarily homeless individuals — people who do not have access to shelter or permanent housing. The city appealed her injunction, saying the order was so vague it interfered with officials’ ability to enforce other laws on homelessness.
A split Ninth Circuit panel affirmed Jan. 11 that Ryu did not abuse the court's discretion by requiring the city to comply with its “bag and tag” policy for removing people’s property from streets. The panel rebuffed officials' argument distinguishing San Francisco’s ordinances from those cited in the landmark case Martin v. Boise, which bars cities without enough shelter beds from moving homeless people, because the city allows people to sleep in public during certain hours.
Ryu will soon issue an order to clarify if the preliminary injunction she placed on the city in 2022 applies only to the city’s enforcement of laws against those who are found to be involuntarily homeless.
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