Overturn Papachristou v. City of JacksonvilleThe vagrancy case encoded a theory of law that prioritizes the dissolute’s liberty over the community’s order.
Charles Fain Lehman
Aug 15, 2022
Overturning Roe seemed like a pipe dream until it finally happened. Now that the worst modern legal precedent is gone, we asked TAC contributors: Which bad decision should the Supreme Court overturn next?
Earlier this year, New York City straphangers were shocked by the shoving murder of Michelle Go, pushed in front of an oncoming subway train by 61-year-old Martial Simon. It was a realization of New Yorkers’ worst fears: that the city’s uncontrolled serious mental illness and homelessness problems (Simon was part of both) would lead to bloodshed.
Why, a reasonable person might ask, was a potentially violent, mentally ill homeless man not detained by the police? The answers are many and varied, but in part they are because of the waning legal ability of police officers to apprehend publicly troublesome individuals before they act out. The campaign against that discretion is long, but a key waypoint is Papachristou v. City of Jacksonville, the Supreme Court’s 1972 decision that began a decades-long assault on vagrancy laws.
Vagrancy bans are a prime example of police discretion. The statute in Papachristou, for example, permitted the arrest of anyone deemed a “rogue,” “vagabond,” “common drunkard,” or numerous other disorderly occupations. Nothing about this was unusual. In 1949, vagrancy was illegal in every state and the basis of “hundreds of thousands” of arrests every year, legal historian Risa Goluboff writes in Vagrant Nation.
“A prominent 1946 treatise captured prevailing sentiment when it concluded that vagrancy laws’ legality ‘cannot be doubted,’” Goluboff writes. “Four hundred years on the books were decisive evidence of their legitimacy.” But none of that mattered to the Court, which ruled 7–0 that Jacksonville’s statute was insufficiently clear about what behavior was proscribed and therefore void for vagueness.
Why did the Court eject centuries of law? One theory is that Papachristou, like other contemporary criminal justice cases, were a check on rampant systemic racism. After all, named plaintiff Margaret Papachristou and her friend Betty Calloway were white, while the men with whom they were arrested, Eugene Melton and Leonard Johnson, were black.
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Source:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/overturn-papachristou-v-city-of-jacksonville/
