From the Wool-sack
| Publication year | 1993 |
| Pages | 508 |
| Citation | Vol. 22 No. 3 Pg. 508 |
1993, March, Pg. 508. FROM THE WOOL-SACK
The law in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread. Anatole France, Le Lys Rouge
The last two years have been good to the homeless---at least as far as their constitutional rights are concerned.
In the fall of 1991, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal by the state of Connecticut from a lower court decision acknowledging a homeless person's right of privacy notwithstanding his homeless state.
In September 1992, a federal district court in New York held that homeless people could not be arrested for begging. Two months later, a federal district court judge in Florida said a person's homelessness does not give police the right to arrest that person and destroy that person's possessions.
The Connecticut court protected the rights of a homeless man who lived by a bridge abutment under a highway overpass. It said he had a reasonable expectation of privacy in the contents of his duffel bag and a cardboard box located in the area in which he lived.
In its ruling, the court said: "The interior of those two items represented, in effect, the defendant's last shred of privacy from the prying eyes of outsiders, including the police. Our notions of custom and civility, and our code of value would include some measure of respect for that shred of privacy and would recognize its assertion as reasonable under the circumstances of this case."
In so holding, the court suppressed the evidence obtained by the unlawful search and seizure of the homeless man's belongings.
In the New York case, the court was asked to rule on the constitutionality of a statute that prohibited begging. The court found the prohibition unconstitutional, saying: "A peaceful beggar poses no threat to society. The beggar has arguably only committed the offense of being needy.... If some portion of society is offended, the answer is not in criminalizing those people, debtor's prisons being long gone, but addressing the root cause of their existence."
The Florida court took yet another step to protect the homeless. Asked to rule on the propriety of picking up the homeless and moving them for the sake of movement, Judge C. Clyde Atkins found that the City of Miami "has a policy and...
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