'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.