During oral arguments in City of Grants Pass v. Johnson on Monday, Justice Sonia Sotomayor questioned Kelsi Corkran, attorney for Gloria Johnson, about pet ownership for those who are homeless.
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NewsTranscript
00:00Thank you.
00:01The plaintiff, I'm sorry, the plaintiff who died here had used up her provisional
00:07stay credits at the time of class certification, so she no longer had a shelter who was willing
00:13to take her.
00:14I think the hard hypothetical that Justice Alito was positing, and in part Justice Gorsuch,
00:20is the person who owns a dog.
00:24Or let's say a mentally ill person, do you have the same response as the government?
00:30So I would like to live in a world where separating someone from their pet is cruel, but it's
00:36outside the scope of our claim because we are just talking about physical and legal
00:41access to shelter.
00:42So if someone turns down a shelter offer that's physically and legally available because of
00:48their dog, they would not be within the scope of our claim.
00:51To get to the mental health hypothetical, if a person's mental health issues made the
00:58shelter either physically unavailable to them because if they went there they would be at
01:02substantial risk of bodily harm or death, then I would say the shelter isn't physically
01:07available.
01:08You could also have a shelter that won't take people with mental health problems, in
01:11which case it wouldn't be legally available to them.
01:14I would say that if the shelter is physically and legally available, then they're outside
01:18the scope of our claim, but they might have ADA claims or some other law that applies
01:23that would restrict the city's ability to punish them for not going to that place.
01:29But it's outside our case.