Key Points

  • The Ninth Circuit held that discrimination under Title II of the ADA may include a public entity's failure to provide a reasonable accommodation that would allow a person with a disability to comply with a criminal ordinance.
  • The denial of a request for reasonable accommodation is a concrete Article III injury, and Beram's alleged monetary and emotional harms are additional injuries supporting standing to seek damages.
  • Applying the pre-enforcement credible-threat test to an ADA claim for the first time, the panel held that police warnings that the ordinance requires before any charge were the first step of enforcement and supported standing to seek an injunction.
  • The city's public-safety and workability arguments go to the reasonableness of the accommodation on the merits, not to whether Title II applies.
  • The panel affirmed dismissal of the abandoned Eighth Amendment claim and remanded with leave for Beram to file a fifth amended complaint.

A federal appeals court ruled Thursday that the Americans with Disabilities Act can require a city to accommodate a disabled person who cannot comply with a criminal law, reviving a lawsuit by a Sedona, Ariz., woman whose obsessive-compulsive disorder often keeps her sleeping in her car instead of her apartment.

A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit reversed a lower court's ruling that Sabrina Beram lacked standing, the threshold requirement that a plaintiff show a concrete injury a court can remedy. Judge Roopali H. Desai wrote the opinion, joined by Judge Ana de Alba and U.S. District Judge Edward M. Chen, sitting by designation. No judge wrote separately.

The court said it had never before considered whether Title II of the ADA applies to criminal ordinances. It held that it does: a city's refusal to make a reasonable accommodation that would let a disabled person comply with a criminal law can count as discrimination. The panel also applied, for the first time in an ADA case, the standing test for challenging a criminal law before it is enforced.

Sedona's ordinance prohibits sleeping in a vehicle on any public or private property and makes it a crime for a property owner to knowingly allow it. A violation is a class 1 misdemeanor punishable by a fine of up to $2,500, six months in jail, or both. No one may be arrested under the ordinance without first being warned by a police officer or a property owner.

According to her complaint, when Beram "perceives unclean conditions in her apartment," she feels something like "an electric fence" that "commands her not to enter." On those nights she sleeps in her car, usually in her apartment complex's parking lot. Sedona police officers have twice warned her, once at a public trailhead and once at a park, where an officer said she would be cited if she did not comply. She has not been arrested or charged.

Her property manager threatened to end her lease and barred her from sleeping in her car, citing the ordinance. Beram then asked the city for an accommodation under Title II. After the city refused to exempt her anywhere in Sedona, she narrowed the request, asking that the city "refrain from charging [Beram] with any violation of the [ordinance] while she sleeps in her vehicle on the premises of her apartment complex." The city denied that request too.

Beram alleged that she spent "115–135 hours searching for alternative sleeping options" and lost income as her mental condition worsened. She sued the city and the complex's owner, which settled and agreed to let her sleep in her car in the lot, though it may rescind the deal if either of them is warned or charged under the ordinance.

U.S. District Judge Diane J. Humetewa of the District of Arizona dismissed the case and denied Beram leave to file a fourth amended complaint. The judge held that the two warnings were "insufficient to support a specific warning or threat to initiate prosecution" and that Beram had not alleged past enforcement against anyone "similarly situated" to her.

On damages, Desai wrote that the denial of a request for reasonable accommodation is itself a concrete injury. In passing the ADA, the opinion said, Congress "elevate[d]" the legal status of disability discrimination, a "harm that exist[ed] in the real world." Beram's lost income and emotional distress supplied additional injuries, the court held.

For the injunction, the panel asked whether Beram faced "a credible threat of enforcement," the test for plaintiffs who challenge a criminal law before being charged. It found that she had a "concrete plan" to keep sleeping in her car "multiple times each week." Because the ordinance requires a warning before anyone is charged, Desai wrote, "the officers' warnings were not mere threats of enforcement: they were the first step of enforcement."

The city's record of citing at least two people on private property "slightly favors Beram," the court added. The panel rejected the city's argument that any harm traced to her landlord because the city "cannot control private lease agreements," noting that the ordinance itself punishes owners who let someone sleep in a car on their property.

On the merits, the city argued that the ADA categorically does not apply to someone seeking an accommodation to comply with a criminal ordinance. The panel disagreed, relying on earlier Ninth Circuit rulings applying Title II to a zoning ordinance and to Portland, Ore.'s civil nuisance ordinance. "We see no principled way to distinguish between the criminal ordinance here and the civil ordinance in McGary," Desai wrote.

The city had warned that applying the ADA to criminal ordinances would be unworkable and would impair public safety. The panel held that those concerns bear on the merits, not on whether Title II applies, writing that the city's public safety arguments may "inform the reasonableness analysis under the ADA." The city may also argue that an exemption "would fundamentally alter the nature of the [city's] service, program, or activity," Desai wrote.

The panel affirmed the dismissal of Beram's Eighth Amendment claim, which she abandoned after the Supreme Court's 2024 decision in City of Grants Pass, Oregon v. Johnson.

Pamela M. Bridge of Community Legal Services Inc. argued for Beram. Sedona City Attorney Kurt W. Christianson argued for the city. Nancy L. Davidson represented the League of Arizona Cities and Towns as a friend of the court.

The case returns to the district court, where Beram may file a fifth amended complaint seeking damages and declaratory and injunctive relief. The panel said she may add a fact her lawyer raised at oral argument: that the property owner has stopped letting her sleep in her car because it fears enforcement. Whether her requested accommodation is reasonable, the panel said, "is not before us."