Pubdate: Mon, 01 Apr 2002 Source: Daily Camera (CO) Copyright: 2002 The Daily Camera. Contact: http://www.thedailycamera.com/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/103 'ONE STRIKE' EVICTIONS PUNISH TOO MANY INNOCENTS Pearlie Rucker didn't deserve this. Congress and the courts don't seem to care. Rucker is a 66-year-old resident of Oakland, Calif. Four years ago, Rucker's daughter was caught three blocks from home with some cocaine. At the time, Rucker and her daughter lived in public housing. The Oakland Housing Authority immediately moved to evict Rucker, despite the fact that she had no knowledge of or control over her daughter's drug use. Rucker and three other victims of zero-tolerance evictions challenged the evictions in court. Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a federal law permitting the eviction of public-housing tenants for drug use. Under federal law, that means any drug use or other drug-related offense, whether committed by the tenant, a tenant's child, a houseguest, whether committed on the premises of the apartment or nearby, whether the tenant knew of it, or had any reason to suspect that a child, sibling, acquaintance or houseguest would use or possess illegal drugs in or near the tenant's apartment. Such evictions may be (and are) carried out upon the first instance of such drug use (or, for that matter, any violent crime). William Rehnquist, chief justice of the Supreme Court, wrote the court's ruling, which was joined by all participating justices. The court ruled that the language of the federal law is unambiguous. "Any" drug-related criminal activity is grounds for eviction, "whether or not the tenant knew, or should have known, about the activity," Rehnquist wrote, dispassionately. The court held that no constitutional question was at stake. After all, each tenant signed a lease agreeing to the terms of federal law. The law does not impose criminal sanctions on the general populace, Rehnquist wrote. Instead, it allows the government to act as "landlord of property that it owns, invoking a clause in a lease to which respondents have agreed and which Congress has expressly required." Furthermore, the court opined, the one-strike evictions are discretionary, not mandatory. The federal government portrays the one- strike evictions as a last resort, rarely used against innocent tenants like Pearlie Rucker. Because of that discretion, and because of the dire public-safety issues at stake, the court firmly endorsed the constitutionality and the moral defensibility of the law. But Rucker's case is not unique, and the law evicts innocent, hapless people. A friend-of-the-court brief filed by the Coalition to Protect Public Housing and the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law makes this point in grim detail. For instance, there was a 20-year-old single mother of two in Georgia who asked a coworker to retrieve something from her apartment. The coworker's boyfriend, whom the tenant never met, smoked a joint in the tenant's home. Before leaving, he dropped a single marijuana seed on the floor. Shortly thereafter, police barged into the home and found nothing but the single seed. Eviction proceedings commenced. There was a mentally disabled, illiterate grandmother in Michigan whose daughter was listed on the lease but who had not lived with her mother in years. The daughter, neither living with or generally speaking to the mother, was busted for cocaine across town. Yet the mother was served with eviction papers. And there was a single mother in Chicago whose boyfriend beat her with a broomstick until it broke in half. He also punched holes in her walls. The woman severed relations with the man and got a court- imposed restraining order against him. Nevertheless, the Chicago Housing Authority didn't just evict her; it locked her out of her own home. All of this only underscores a single point. The one-strike law may not be unconstitutional. But it is patently unconscionable. The high court has let the law stand. Congress should not. - --- MAP posted-by: Josh