Ex-Drinker Resumes His Lonely Quest to Decriminalize Public Drunkenness

Once again, Sioux Indian Robert Sundance is on a lonely road, filing his own petition to challenge the state’s criminal law against public drunkenness. This time, he has petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court.

Twelve years ago, Sundance was a chronic Skid Row alcoholic who, from local jail cells, started submitting handwritten court petitions to protest how public inebriates are handled by the criminal justice system.

With the help of public-interest attorneys, his complaints eventually turned into a landmark class-action lawsuit that reformed Los Angeles City procedures for arresting and detaining public drunks.

Most Important Quest

But he lost what he considered his most important quest--which went all the way to the California Supreme Court--to decriminalize public drunkenness itself.

The state high court ruled on that matter last Dec. 31, and rejected Sundance’s claim that such arrests violate constitutional guarantees against cruel and unusual punishment. It declined to require that all public inebriates be sent to civil detoxification facilities instead of jail, saying that it was up to the state Legislature, not the courts, to decriminalize public drunkenness. At least 35 other states have already done so.

Under the state Penal Code, public drunkenness is a misdemeanor punishable by up to six months in jail.

The court left intact, however, the sweeping health and safety reforms the city was ordered to institute in 1978 by the Los Angeles Superior Court, and sent the case back to Los Angeles, saying that the same reforms should be imposed on Los Angeles County as well. That matter is now pending in Superior Court.

Decline Assistance

Attorneys from the Public Justice Foundation and the Center for Law in the Public Interest, who had handled the Sundance case, declined to assist Sundance in trying for U.S. Supreme Court review of the constitutional issue.

“Proceeding . . . has to be evaluated in terms of the chances of winning as well as the risks,” said Timothy McFlynn, head of the Public Justice Foundation. If the court accepts Sundance’s petition and rules against him, other gains achieved by the case could also be lost in the court’s current conservative climate, he warned.

So Sundance, now 60, is on his own again. Sober for 10 years and now director of the Indian Alcoholism Commission, he said recently: “I don’t want to stop here. I want to erase 647 (f) (the Penal Code section making public drunkenness a crime). Alcoholism is a sickness and public drunkenness should be stricken from the law books.”

Commenting on Sundance’s action, McFlynn said: “It is totally in character for Bob once again to be proudly filing a handwritten petition from the heart.”