Wills v. City of Monterey

Background

Cynthia S. Wills, proceeding without a lawyer, sued the City of Monterey, the Monterey Police Department, and the Monterey Harbor Patrol over enforcement of city ordinances prohibiting public camping. She also sued Montage Health over separate allegations, but Montage Health was not the subject of this order.

Wills alleged that she became unhoused around March 2019 and stayed at different times in a car, a tent, and places without shelter in Monterey and Seaside, California. She alleged that Monterey police and harbor patrol officers threatened to arrest her or issue citations for camping on public property. The court stated that the record did not show that she was ever actually cited, arrested, or fined for public camping.

Wills’s operative complaint asserted that enforcing the ordinances against her violated the Eighth Amendment’s Cruel and Unusual Punishments Clause because she had no available shelter and was forced to sleep outside. Her earlier Fourteenth Amendment claims against the City Defendants had been dismissed with permission to amend, but Wills did not amend them. The Eighth Amendment claim was therefore her only remaining claim against those defendants.

Motion for Judgment on the Pleadings

The City Defendants moved for judgment on the pleadings under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 12(c). That procedure allows a court to decide whether, accepting the allegations in the pleadings as true, the moving party is entitled to judgment as a matter of law.

The City Defendants argued that the Supreme Court’s decision in City of Grants Pass v. Johnson controlled the case. In Grants Pass, the Supreme Court held that enforcing public-camping ordinances against unhoused people did not violate the Eighth Amendment’s Cruel and Unusual Punishments Clause. The Supreme Court explained that the clause focuses on the method or kind of punishment imposed after a crime, rather than on whether a law targets a person’s status. It also held that the ordinance there punished conduct rather than the status of being unhoused.

The court found that the Monterey ordinances were not materially different from the ordinance considered in Grants Pass. It held that Wills could not challenge the ordinances on the theory that they punished unhoused people based on status. The court further noted that Wills had not alleged any formal punishment and had not established that any punishment would qualify as cruel or unusual.

Other Requests and Disposition

The court granted the City Defendants’ motion for judgment on the pleadings. Because no further claims against those defendants remained, the court dismissed the City Defendants.

During the hearing, Wills verbally requested permission to amend her claims to plead an excessive-fines-and-fees theory under the Eighth Amendment. The court denied that request because it had already granted her permission to amend on two occasions and trial was approximately two months away, with the case proceeding only against Montage Health.

The court also denied Wills’s motion for permission to file a motion for reconsideration of an earlier order denying an extension of time to complete discovery concerning Montage Health. The court found that she had not shown a sufficient basis for reconsideration. The order stated that it disposed of Docket Nos. 184 and 212.