During oral arguments in the City of Grants Pass v. Johnson on Monday, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson questioned US Deputy Solicitor General Edwin Kneedler about punishing people for basic human needs.
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00:00Mr. Kneedler, isn't the response also that those two things are different?
00:05I mean, you're sort of saying it's about individual culpability, but it's not as though everyone engages in drug use, right?
00:13Certain people do, and maybe they have addiction and maybe you can't punish them because of the addiction,
00:19but you can still punish them as criminally culpable for engaging in the act.
00:24It seems to me we are in a totally different category when you're talking about acts that everybody participates in,
00:31that no one thinks in and of themselves are criminally culpable,
00:36and yet somehow the statute is reaching out to punish certain people who engage in that universal human basic need.
00:45That seems to me to be the distinction.
00:47Yes, that is a critical distinction.
00:49And not only is it something that everybody engages in, but it's something that everybody has to engage in to be alive.
00:55So if you can't sleep, you can't live.
00:59And therefore, by prohibiting sleeping, the city is basically saying you cannot live in Grant's Pass.
01:06It's the equivalent of banishment, which is something that is unknown to the way—
01:11Mr. Kneedler, wasn't—