The circuit’s rulings generally apply in Nevada. But Las Vegas City Attorney Brad Jerbic points out that the 9th Circuit judges specifically cited the current Las Vegas ordinance -- under which recumbent bums are only held to be breaking the law if they obstruct pedestrians or vehicles -- as a good example of how a city can “avoid criminalizing” homelessness.

Therefore “We’re going to continue to enforce our ordinance until a court of competent jurisdiction tells us otherwise,” Mr. Jerbic said Monday.

The panel ruled 2-1 Friday that the Eighth Amendment, barring cruel and unusual punishment, prohibits Los Angeles “from punishing involuntary sitting, lying, or sleeping on public sidewalks that is an unavoidable consequence of being human and homeless without shelter.”

The Los Angeles ordinance had gone largely unenforced until recent years, when police -- struggling to reduce a homeless population that by some counts is the largest in the country -- started using the ordinance in an effort to clean up Skid Row, a 50-block area east of downtown that has long been home to the down-and-out.

There, some 10,000 to 12,000 homeless people now live near new condominiums and apartment buildings that have arisen in an explosion of gentrification. The ruling said there was shelter for 9,000 to 10,000 homeless people in that area, leaving about 1,000 or more people without a roof over their heads.

“So long as there are a greater number of homeless individuals in Los Angeles than the number of available beds, the city may not enforce” the ordinance, the judges declared.

At first glance, the ruling appears humane. After all, being down on your luck is not a crime, in and of itself. Who wouldn’t sympathize with some harmless fellow hauled off to jail for merely nodding off at the bus stop while waiting for his bus?

In fact, though, the judges’ underlying premises here turn out on closer examination to be bizarre and almost unsupportable. Once large bands of homeless people colonize public spaces such as parks, sidewalks and libraries, those areas are effectively denied to the very taxpayers who fund them. The potential problems with sanitation, disease, and public health should be obvious.

The judges do not really mean there are 1,000 too few beds in Los Angeles; they mean there are 1,000 too few FREE beds. If these homeless people had gotten an education (available free, courtesy of the long-suffering taxpayers), avoided debilitating addiction, worked and saved till they could afford to buy a home or rent an apartment or a hotel room, they would not be “homeless,” would they?

Yes, adults have a right to become shiftless winos. But they have no right to compel anyone else to finance their folly -- nor can they delegate any such non-existent right to government (as even this 9th Circuit ruling admits.)

The court calls the behaviors of the homeless “involuntary,” and their outcomes “unavoidable.” But this is like saying the penetration of a human body by a fast-moving bullet is “unavoidable,” without tracing events back down to someone’s very “voluntary” and “avoidable” decision to pull the trigger.

We do not punish someone who suffers an unexpected epileptic seizure, even if it causes an accident, because that’s “involuntary.” But the court here willfully ignores the fact that the plight of most homeless people is the perfectly predictable consequence of a long chain of bad -- and thoroughly “voluntary” -- decisions.

Bad behavior has negative consequences. Buffer men from those unpleasant consequences, and -- since it takes less effort -- you will get more bad behavior.

Are there really no agricultural jobs available in California that include barracks-style housing? If a man chooses to beg spare change in the city rather than seek out one of those rural jobs, is his plight really “unavoidable”? Does the Army no longer accept volunteers?

Do we really think this will stop with only 12,000? Aren’t there millions more in Latin America who would love to throw up plastic shacks, use our streets as sewers, and live for free in sunny California or Nevada -- while U.S. politicians cringe at the prospect of arresting them or turning them back? With U.S. taxpayers obliged to fund their “free” education and health care, the sky’s the limit, no?

Even more bizarre is the assertion here that arresting people who have set up housekeeping on the sidewalks, using the streets as their toilets, constitutes “cruel and unusual punishment.”

In a pragmatic sense, arrest in this day and age -- being thrown in an open “holding tank” for an indeterminate time with violent, contagious, and/or depraved cellmates -- can indeed seem like a punishment. The justices of the U.S. Supreme Court, as a matter of fact, showed a callous indifference to this reality -- and the high suicide rate it generates -- when they ruled in 1997 that it was OK to handcuff and jail people for crimes as minor as that of Gail Atwater, a Texas mom arrested for driving slowly down a dirt road looking for a lost teddy bear without having her kids properly strapped into her vehicle.

But in a legal sense, arrest is not punishment. It’s only intended as a means to stop an ongoing illegal behavior and guarantee that the accused shows up in court.

All arrestees are presumed innocent, and no one should be punished till found guilty, right? So if arrest is a “punishment,” then it’s cruel and unusual to arrest anyone for anything ... isn’t it?

Life without any police might not be as bad as some believe, once they gave us back our guns. But does the 9th Circuit really intend here that our police forces be disbanded, entirely?

In light of Friday’s ruling, Southern Nevada governments should now reconsider their policy of targeting the homeless by “sweeping” homeless encampments and what he calls selective enforcement of the laws, argues Allen Lichtenstein, general counsel for the ACLU of Nevada.

Las Vegas also has a “shortage of beds” for the homeless population here, points out Nevada ACLU Executive Director Gary Peck.

Mr. Peck also appears to mean “free beds.” Presumably, he would prefer that money be seized from the taxpayers to build free condominiums for all who apply. Perhaps he -- and the judges of the 9th Circuit -- will donate the first $100,000. But will they also consent to live there?