Public Interest Briefs

Court Rules in Center’s Challenge to Public Drunkenness Laws

Opinion Labels System “Tragedy”-- Finds Massive Violations of Constitutional Rights

Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Harry Hupp has issued his decision in Sundance v. Municipal Court. The lengthy memorandum Opinion announces an important series of favorable rulings expected to result in substantial and far-reaching changes in the way Los Angeles County’s criminal justice system handles its highest volume “crime”--simple public intoxication. The decision is being widely hailed as a milestone in altering and improving the way society deals with its millions of chronic alcoholics.

The suit was filed by the Center in July, 1975, as a civil rights class action and taxpayers’ action. It charged that the “assembly-line” criminal processing of public inebriates under Penal Code §647(f) resulted in systematic deprivations of constitutional rights and constituted an illegal and wasteful expenditure of public funds. The lawsuit’s aim was twofold: to divert skidrow alcoholics from the counterproductive and overburdened criminal justice system to treatment in more effective and less expensive civil detoxification centers, and to restore integrity to the criminal process by upgrading constitutionally deficient jail conditions, mass-arraignment techniques, and a host of other substandard aspects of a system riddled with injustice.

During the eight-week trial, Center attorneys buttressed the testimony of some 50 witnesses with extensive statistical analyses probing the inner workings of the justice system. They introduced a comprehensive fiscal impact report comparing the costs and benefits of jail and civil diversion alternatives, and massive medical evidence on the causes, diagnosis, and treatment of the disease of alcoholism.

In his opinion, Judge Hupp accepted the conclusions of medical testimony that those afflicted with alcoholism are unable to control their drinking behavior. He held that unconstitutional “cruel and unusual punishment” is inflicted when anyone who can show that he suffers from alcoholism to the point where he cannot take care of himself and cannot refrain from public inebriation is criminally convicted and incarcerated for plain drunk violations. Since most skid row inebriates are chronic homeless alcoholics and have no place to drink but the streets, they would be able to raise a successful Eighth Amendment defense to the charge.

Judge Hupp’s opinion also agreed that the current criminal practices and procedures “result in a widespread denial of due process” rights to public inebriates in Los Angeles. As to the wholesale denial of the right to trial, the Court reviewed the “startling, even astounding” statistics and concluded that “for all practical purposes, the defendant receives his punishment before trial and the trial is irrelevant.”

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