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WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court will consider Monday whether banning homeless people from sleeping outside when shelter space is lacking amounts to cruel and unusual punishment. The case is considered the most significant to come before the high court in decades on homelessness, which has reached record levels in the United States. In California and other Western states, courts have ruled that it’s unconstitutional to fine and arrest people sleeping in homeless encampments if shelter space is lacking. A cross-section of Democratic and Republican officials contend that makes it difficult for them to manage encampments, which can have dangerous...

WASHINGTON (AP) — The most significant case in decades on homelessness has reached the Supreme Court as record numbers of people in America are without a permanent place to live. The justices on Monday will consider a challenge to rulings from a California-based appeals court that found punishing people for sleeping outside when shelter space is lacking amounts to unconstitutional cruel and unusual punishment. A political cross section of officials in the West and California, home to nearly one-third of the nation’s homeless population, argue those decisions have restricted them from “common sense” measures intended to keep homeless encampments from...

The Supreme Court agreed on Friday to weigh in on whether homeless individuals have the right to camp on public property. The issue is the biggest SCOTUS case in decades on the rights of the homeless, and the decision has the potential to impact how cities across the U.S. handle the homelessness crisis. Grants Pass, located in southwestern Oregon with a population of nearly 40,000, requested that the high court review a lower court decision that ruled it unconstitutional to punish homeless residents for camping on public property when no shelter alternatives are unavailable. According to court filings, there are...

Squatters have taken over a Wyoming city after some left millions of dollars worth of damage to a motel and others left 500lbs of feces in the downtown area. Casper, the second-largest city in the state, is home to 60,000 residents but now also has about 200 homeless people. Some have seized various properties that are empty or abandoned, including an abandoned Econo Lodge motel that hasn't operated since November. Casper Mayor Bruce Knell described the extent of destruction as akin to 'third-world-country stuff'. 'It's like nothing I've ever seen. It's third-world-country stuff happening in Casper, Wyoming,' he told Cowboy...

The most powerful federal appeals court in the western United States once again refused to let cities and towns force the homeless off of the streets unless communities provide shelter for them. Cities large and small across the west coast have tried, and failed, to overturn the higher court's ruling for years, the latest of which came from the Oregon city, Grants Pass. "We are having a situation where the police were telling homeless people that they couldn't sleep in public or private, and private property," said Grants Pass Mayor Sara Bristol. "And eventually, that kind of boiled down to...

Wednesday’s decision by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals builds on a 2018 ruling involving the city of Boise, which found a person cannot be punished for sleeping in public if there’s nowhere else for them to go. A federal appeals court Wednesday upheld a ruling that found the city of Grants Pass in southern Oregon violated the constitutional rights of people experiencing homelessness through a series of ordinances designed to prevent sleeping outside on public property.In a 2-1 decision, judges on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals largely upheld a 2020 injunction issued by U.S. Magistrate Judge Mark Clarke,...

GRANTS PASS, Ore. (AP) — Police shot and killed a man on Tuesday at the offices of the Oregon State Police in a southwestern Oregon town, authorities said. The Grants Pass Department of Public Safety said in a statement that several state troopers received minor injuries during the incident. Details on what happened were not immediately divulged, but Rep. Carl Wilson, R-Grants Pass, said the state police likely saved lives.

Imagine looking into your irritated eye for a pesky eyelash, only to pull out a translucent, wiggling worm nearly a half inch long. “I looked at it, and it was moving,” recalled 28-year-old Abby Beckley of Grants Pass, Oregon. “And then it died within about five seconds.” Now, imagine doing that not once but 14 times. That’s what Beckley endured over a three-week period in August 2016. Her story, published Monday as a case report by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is a historic one: “This is only the 11th time a person has been infected by...

GRANTS PASS -- A man who owns a gold-mining claim on federal land in southwestern Oregon asked for help defending it after U.S. authorities ordered him to stop work, but he is now telling his armed supporters to back off. Rick Barclay said Thursday that he hoped to prevent his fight with federal regulators from turning into the kind of high-profile standoff at a Nevada ranch last year. He initially called in a local chapter of constitutional activists known as the Oath Keepers because he thought the U.S. Bureau of Land Management would seize the equipment on his mining claim...

The family of an Oregon first-grader is outraged that his school forced the boy to sit by himself during lunch as punishment for being late. The boy’s grandmother, Laura Hoover, took to Facebook to protest his retribution with photos of Hunter sulking into a cardboard wall blocking his view of a cafeteria bustling with his peers. “His momma’s car sometimes doesn’t like to start right up. Sometimes he’s a couple minutes late to school. Yesterday, he was one minute late,” Hoover wrote. “This is what his momma discovered they do to punish him.” His mother, Nicole Garloff, came to check...

GRANTS PASS, Or. -- Even though the raises are in the budget, a group of Grants Pass city employees says higher salaries would be unseemly. Members of the Grants Pass Employee Association have told city officials they'll forgo 2.5 percent cost of living adjustments due with the new year. Association leaders say the members looked at the overall economy and the layoffs among major local employers and decided they didn't want their friends and neighbors to see them as grabbing money. The decision is expected to save the city at least $87,000. Assistant City Manager Laurel Samson said nearly 100...

Josephine County residents may be taking their safety into their own hands. Sheriff Gil Gilbertson has been warning the public of potentially dangerous cuts to public safety, and it looks like his message is getting through. The sheriff's office reported nearly 430 applications for concealed weapons permits since the first of the year. That number wasn't reached until mid-July last year. Residents of Grants Pass are not surprised by the news. Gun shop owner Bud Hopson says, "The people are asking the questions and the sheriff has come out and said that basically we won't have any means to respond...

Searchers intensified their efforts Tuesday to find a San Francisco man missing for more than a week in a rugged, remote area of the snow-covered Oregon Coast Range as his wife and two young children, rescued just the day before, recovered in a hospital. Trained dogs, horse patrols and a helicopter with heat-sensitive sensors were sent to join other helicopters, snowmobiles and foot patrols Tuesday for 35-year-old James Kim. Trackers had followed his footprints until dark Monday night. "They determined that he went over the side of the road into the Big Windy Creek drainage area and that's when the...