No one should be punished for a crime someone else committed.

That simple notion is at the heart of our criminal justice system—we are all innocent until proven guilty and should be punished only for things the government can prove we did. But try telling that to Granite City, Illinois, where city officials tried to kick Andy Simpson and Debi Brumit (along with Debi’s grandchildren) out of their home as punishment for a crime everyone agrees they did not commit.

Why? Because Debi’s daughter (who did not live with her) stole a van elsewhere in town. In May of 2019, Debi realized that her youngest daughter had developed a serious substance-abuse problem. Debi took in her daughter’s two young children and told her daughter to leave them alone until she was ready to get clean. Weeks later, Debi’s daughter called her mom to say she wanted to turn her life around, so Debi did what moms do: She drove to where her daughter was staying in Missouri, picked her and her boyfriend up, and brought them to an in-patient treatment facility in Granite City.

But the treatment center didn’t last. Late that night, the daughter and her boyfriend showed up at Debi and Andy’s house, having checked themselves out of the center and now looking for a ride back to Missouri. Debi and Andy refused and told the pair to leave. That was the last they heard from them until Monday, when they first learned that the two had been arrested for stealing a van, apparently in an effort to drive themselves back home. Debi and Andy continued to do the only thing they could: try to provide the best life they could for the grandkids while hoping Debi’s daughter one day could overcome her substance-abuse challenges.

But that wasn’t good enough for Granite City. The city wanted everyone evicted from the house: Debi, Andy, and the kids.

The problem is that Granite City had what it calls a “crime-free” housing ordinance that amounted to a compulsory eviction law. Under the law, if you rented your home in Granite City and any member of your “household” or even a guest committed a crime—anywhere in the city and, sometimes, anywhere at all—then your landlord would be required to evict you. In fact, your landlord could be fined and even lose his rental license if he failed to evict you. That meant Debi and Andy were on the hook for the van theft, even though no one believed they had anything to do with it or even knew about it.

But Debi and Andy’s landlord didn’t want to evict them. They were good tenants, and they had done nothing wrong. And Debi and Andy wanted to stay: They couldn’t afford to move on short notice, and they weren’t sure what would happen to the small children in their care.

That is why Debi and Andy teamed up with the Institute for Justice to sue Granite City to affirm the basic principle that Americans cannot be rendered homeless as punishment for other people’s crimes. What Granite City calls its crime-free housing law was an exercise in collective punishment and guilt by association. That’s not just wrong; it’s unconstitutional. On October 2019, a federal judge entered a restraining order that kept Debi and Andy safely in their homes. Over several years of litigation, the City amended its crime-free housing ordinance, and Debi and Andy ended up moving away from Granite City. Those developments, the Seventh Circuit held, mooted the case.

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In 2016, Debi and Andy moved into a modest home in Granite City with Debi’s youngest daughter, then seven months pregnant with her first child. The daughter moved out about six months later to live with her older sister in Missouri and, at some point thereafter, eventually began struggling with substance abuse. By May of 2019, it was clear to Debi that something had to change. She took in her daughter’s two children and made clear to her daughter that she would not be allowed to see them until she could prove she was ready to get clean and get her life in order. When that happened, Debi made clear, she and Andy would do everything in their power to help. But until that happened, the daughter had to go.

Debi had hoped exactly that was happening when her daughter called to ask for help a few weeks later, saying that she and her new boyfriend wanted to get clean. Debi promptly drove to where they were living in Missouri and brought the two of them to an in-patient treatment center in Granite City, where she stayed until they were taken in.

But the pair seem to have promptly changed their minds. Late that night, they turned up at Debi and Andy’s house, having checked themselves out of the medical center. After Debi and Andy refused to let them stay in the house or to drive them back to Missouri, they left. And, apparently, some time later, they were arrested for attempting to steal a van.

In response, Granite City ordered Debi and Andy’s landlord to evict them. Not because they stole anything—they didn’t. And not even because anyone who lived with them stole anything—Debi’s daughter and her boyfriend lived in Missouri. Instead, Granite City demanded their eviction under its compulsory eviction law because Debi’s daughter (a houseguest) had committed a crime.

Compulsory Eviction Laws Like Granite City’s Punish Innocent People for the Crimes of Their Roommates, Parents or Children

Compulsory eviction laws like Granite City’s trace their roots to “one-strike” policies adopted by public housing authorities in the 1980s and 1990s. 1 Under those policies, the government (acting as landlord) routinely evicted whole families on the grounds that a single member of the family had committed a crime, arguing these harsh policies were necessary to keep large public housing complexes safe. Innocent tenants fought back in court, but, in 2002, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a federal law allowing public housing authorities to evict even innocent tenants based on crimes committed by family members or guests. 2 That ruling was strictly limited to the public housing sphere; the Court suggested the due process analysis might be “entirely different” if the government were to eject private renters from their homes. 3

Despite the explicit narrowness of the Supreme Court’s ruling, municipalities across the country inexplicably took that decision as license to start imposing similar compulsory eviction requirements on private landlords and tenants as well. 4

The result is that hundreds, perhaps thousands, of municipalities across the country have adopted “crime-free” housing ordinances. The Sargent Shriver National Center on Poverty Law has identified more than 50 municipalities in Illinois with crime-free housing ordinances. 5 A separate analysis by a Minnesota-based tenants’ rights association found almost 50 compulsory eviction jurisdictions in the Twin Cities metro area alone. 6

These laws vary in their severity. Some apply only to crimes that lack serious penalties and rely on informally pressuring landlords to evict those who commit crimes. At the far end of the spectrum are laws like Granite City’s—laws that mandate eviction for crimes committed anywhere by anyone—a roommate, a parent, a child—in the household and that carry serious penalties for landlords who resist.

A Pattern of Contempt for Renters’ Property Rights

Of course, Granite City’s compulsory eviction law didn’t apply to everybody; it mandated evicting only people who rent their homes. In other words, Debi and Andy weren’t facing eviction just because a houseguest committed a crime. They were facing eviction because a houseguest committed a crime, and Debi and Andy aren’t rich enough to qualify for a traditional mortgage.

But that is no reason to punish them. Your home is your castle, whether you own it or rent it, and a lease confers property rights just as a deed does. The government cannot extinguish those rights just because it chooses not to respect them. No one thinks Granite City could get away with evicting a homeowner (or forcing a bank to foreclose on a homeowner) just because a teenage roommate broke the law. Granite City thought it can get away with it only because Debi and Andy are renting.

This sort of governmental contempt for renters is not unusual. Whether they are forcing renters to submit to intrusive government inspections of their homes or forcing people  into homelessness, local governments consistently treat renters as if they—and their rights—were second class. But renters count, and so do their legal rights. That is why Debi and Andy \teamed up with the Institute for Justice to sue Granite City in federal court, standing up for the basic principle that where renters live should be between them and their landlord—not between their landlord and the cops.

Legal Claims

What Granite City was doing was not just wrong. It violated both the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause and the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause. The Constitution does not allow the government to punish people for who their roommates are or for crimes other people have committed. The Supreme Court has said that the government can evict its own tenants based on crimes committed by members of their household. But the Court has expressly noted that this does not mean the government has the power to demand the eviction of private tenants based on nothing more than their association (or even past association) with people the government deems undesirable. At bottom, the most fundamental promise of our constitutional order is that everyone is innocent until proven guilty—and that means proven guilty of a crime they themselves committed. The government cannot take your home—whether you own it or rent it—because someone else did something wrong somewhere else.

In addition to claims under the Due Process Clause and the Equal Protection Clause, Debi and Andy asserted a claim under the Fifth Amendment’s Takings Clause and invoked the constitutional right to association.

Litigation Team

Debi and Andy were represented by the Institute for Justice’s Sam Gedge, Robert McNamara, and Caroline Grace Brothers.

The Institute for Justice

The Institute for Justice is the national law firm for liberty and the nation’s premier defender of property rights. IJ defends the rights of homeowners, as it did in Kelo v. City of New London, and it defends the property rights of renters, as it has done in its pathbreaking class action challenge to New York’s no-fault eviction policy and its repeated defense of the Fourth Amendment rights of tenants objecting to unconstitutional mandatory government inspections. This is also not the first time the Institute for Justice has litigated in the St. Louis area. In 2015, IJ filed a class action lawsuit challenging the city of Pagedale’s use of municipal fines for trivial housing code violations to raise government revenue. That lawsuit resulted in a court order ending Pagedale’s abusive system and putting in place a monitoring plan to ensure it never returns.

  1. Kathryn V. Ramsey, One-Strike 2.0: How Local Governments Are Distorting a Flawed Federal Eviction Law, 65 UCLA L. Rev. 1146, 1169–71 (2018), https://tinyurl.com/y6xzz357.↑[Back to Text]
  2. HUD v. Rucker, 535 U.S. 125 (2002).↑[Back to Text]
  3. Id.at 130.↑[Back to Text]
  4. See, e.g., Ramsey, supra, at 1151.↑[Back to Text]
  5. Emily Werth, Sargent Shriver Nat’l Ctr. on Poverty Law, The Cost of Being “Crime Free”: Legal and Practice Consequences of Crime Free Rental Housing and Nuisance Property Ordinances(2013), https://tinyurl.com/y3mt5kwa.↑[Back to Text]
  6. Eric Hauge, The Problem With Crime-Free Housing Ordinances, ACLU Minn. (June 19, 2018), https://www.aclu-mn.org/en/news/problem-crime-free-housing-ordinances↑[Back to Text]

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