A federal appeals court ruled that a Los Angeles law prohibiting sitting or sleeping on city sidewalks amounted to “cruel and unusual punishment” because LA lacks sufficient shelter housing for the homeless. The decision, according to the LA Times, ends a campaign by the LAPD to remove the massive homeless encampments that spring up every night in that city’s skid row, and could have implications for other laws that target the homeless, like Seattle’s no-sitting law, parks exclusion ordinance and other legacies of the Mark Sidran era.

According to the Times, the ruling “has implications for police agencies around the nation that have grappled with how to deal with the homeless,” including police departments in Portland, Las Vegas, Houston, and Seattle.

[The court] said the disparity between shelter space and the number of homeless guaranteed that sitting, lying or sleeping on public sidewalks was “an unavoidable consequence of being human and homeless without shelter in the city of Los Angeles.”

Thus the city’s enforcement violated the 8th Amendment to the Constitution, which bars cruel and unusual punishment, she said, adding that prior Supreme Court rulings made it clear that the government “may not punish a person for who he is, independent of anything he has done.”