restrooms – Homeless Law Blog

**** The information written here is not legal advice and the author of this blog is not your lawyer. These posts merely contain ideas to help you plan and organize your legal research and identify potentially helpful sources of law. ****

Aside from the already mentioned health regulations stating that where there are toilets there must be sinks and where there are sinks there must be soap, the legal rights connected to using public bathing facilities depend, as always, on whether the place is run by the government or a private entity. The particular activities that people may undertake in the facility depend on the staffing, physical plant, and monetary resources of the place and are not a matter of law. They do not have to allow shaving or nail cutting or tooth-brushing, for example. They might only have showers, not bathtubs. They might only allow people to bathe individually to prevent people from having sexual encounters there. Law is about the way people and government behave toward each other and how society operates, it rarely ever declares that people are entitled to do any particular activity in a certain place.

Sometimes there are bathing facilities at churches, shelters, nonprofit community centers and other privately operated places that are funded by donations from individuals and businesses. These privately operated facilities are obligated to function according to the direction of their own boards and their funding sources. This means that private facilities can have their own rules and limitations about the circumstances under which they allow people to wash there or obtain hygiene supplies. It also means that they can be unfair in providing their services: allowing some people to have more time than others, excluding some people, not providing notice of rule changes, etc…

If a private agency or organization gets government funding toward a particular service, like establishing bathing facilities, there may be regulatory legal obligations connected with using that funding. The whole facility is probably not subject to those obligations,[i] only the component providing the government-funded service. To find out abut those obligations, which will probably be about the way the service is provided and the conditions of the facility, it is necessary to find out which government agency (i.e., state department of health or county department of welfare or city special grant bureau, etc…) gives that funding and then contact that government agency to obtain a copy of the regulations and instructions for interacting with them if you believe their regulations have not been followed.[ii]

Sometimes, municipalities or counties install public showers and other washing facilities as part of food banks, health clinics, community centers and other social service agencies that those government entities operate. Those kinds of facilities are considered government property because their buildings and their operations are paid for out of the ordinary tax base either through the regular budget stream or specially-dedicated government funds like limited term grants. Public users are entitled to civil rights protections when accessing these government operated facilities. The civil rights protections include things like equal access, freedom from religious impositions (i.e., they can’t force you to say a prayer or participate in religious counseling in order to obtain the service), free speech, freedom from being searched unless the search is a routine security process used for everyone, privacy… (Read more about civil rights on Findlaw.)

All of the rights enumerated in the last paragraph are simply listed as general civil rights principles. Civil rights principles arise from the ways court cases interperet amendments to the U.S. Constitution. So, civil rights is an area of law in which there is often not a clear rule for everyone to follow. Rather, it is a constant analysis of comparisons:

1. weighing the government’s purpose along with its rule and

2. determining whether the rule, as applied in the situation being questioned, is structured just to serve that government interest. If it limits people unfairly by going beyond the scope of the government interest, it violates civil rights.

A helpful resource for learning about civil rights is Justia’s Annotated U.S. Constitution. Read the sections about the Amendments to the Constitution to find easy explanations of how courts have interpreted those amendments. Note that the list of amendments tells what subjects are covered in each amendment (due process, free speech, etc…) Click on the hyperlinked name of any case on that site and you’ll get to the Supreme Court’s full decision.

Here are two examples demonstrating how civil rights can be outweighed by significant government interests:

If a member of the public, who routinely carries a weapon, comes to the public washing facility, the facility can probably justify locking the weapon away while the visitor is on the premises because the facility has an obligation to prevent harm to its staff and users.
People are supposed to have the right to free speech in a public place. However, if someone comes into a washing facility and makes threatening comments to other people bathing there, the facility (i.e., the government) may be at risk of losing the victims of those comments. If the whole purpose of the washing facility is to give people a place to get clean and try to avoid disease, but people were too scared to go there, then it wouldn’t be an effective washing facility anymore unless the place refused to allow threats.

[i] The whole facility can be required to make changes in order to comply with legal requirements and accommodate the government funded part. For example, the building might have to install new doors, or fire safety devices, or a stair railing, or make other kinds of modifications to the building entrance or the building’s systems in order to make the government funded bathing service properly safe and available to public users.

[2] State agencies, such as health departments, publish their regulations in administrative codes. All of the states’ administrative codes are available on the Internet from the National Association of Secretaries of State.

Public restrooms are made available in buildings as a courtesy to enable the public a convenience while they make use of the primary facility for its intended purpose. One of the famous public library cases involving patron behavior makes it very clear that a public facility only has to allow people to use the place for its stated public function, not for any other tangential uses that one might make of it.[i] Another court has specifically said of public restrooms that, “[t]he public’s right to expect privacy in such locations is reasonably limited to the performance of excretionary and ablutional acts indigenous to a restroom, never for sexual acts of any nature.”[ii]

If restrooms are made available so that people can conveniently relieve themselves and wash their hands while making use of a facility, then shaving or brushing teeth would be unusual, but probably not terribly disturbing there; bathing one’s entire body would seem to go far beyond the intended use of the place. Someone doing that might simply be asked by an employee to leave or might be apprehended by police.

Case law has generally demonstrated that people are entitled to privacy when doing activities involving their own body or health in the stalls of public restrooms.[iii] But because our legal codes do not list every single thing that a person has a right to do and employees can call the police at any time that they feel the need for support, it is impossible to list which actions might be grounds for calling the police on someone in a public restroom.

When police are called, they have to investigate whether an illegal act has occurred; that is how they determine whether to charge someone with a crime. The sad fact is that someone doing something perfectly legitimate, especially someone who looks homeless, could arouse staff suspicion and have to answer police questions about what he was doing in the restroom.[iv]

The legal principle that behavior has to be consistent with the purpose of the facility comes from court cases interpreting the U.S. Constitution’s free speech rights. Constitutional issues involve actions taken by government entities. So, government facilities, not businesses, have the constitutional right to assert that certain behavior is prohibited because it exceeds the place’s intended use. Businesses and other privately-owned facilities can also assert that certain behavior is prohibited, but they do it under different authority-the basic right to have control over their domain.

Whether this right to limit behavior comes from the Constitution or a place’s own management policies, police involvement always counts as government action. So, once the police arrive, the restroom user’s constitutional rights to privacy, freedom from illegal search and seizure, etc… are legally protected. As indicated throughout the posts about police and courts, there might be an assortment of charges that the police could apply when faced with behavior that is not precisely described in the crimes code. Washing one’s entire body in a public restroom might be disorderly conduct, public nudity, criminal trespass, public indecency, indecent exposure, or any number of other criminal law violations.[v]

If police charge a restroom user with a crime, he might be able to use constitutional defenses for his behavior in addition to trying to disprove the prosecution’s evidence against him with basic criminal law defenses. Criminal law defenses might come from analyzing the text of the criminal charges or comparing his acts to previous cases. When a defendant makes a constitutional law claim about how the police handled the situation, it is not a defense that excuses or validates the defendant’s own behavior in the public restroom. It is an accusation that the police did something wrong and that, therefore, the prosecution against this defendant is illegitimate.

Often, defendants in public restroom misbehavior cases, which tend to involve people who have been charged for masturbating, drug transactions, and homosexual behavior, assert that the police violated their Fourteenth Amendment due process right to privacy or their Fourth Amendment privacy rights regarding searches and seizures. These privacy rights are not explicit in the words of the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments themselves.[vi]

As is explained in the posts about finding lost property and municipal sweeps of homeless encampments, privacy rights have arisen from cases interpreting the Constitution. The Fourth Amendment search and seizure privacy cases generally ask whether the defendant had a reasonable expectation of privacy in what he was doing. If the court agrees that the expectation of privacy was reasonable under the circumstances and the police actions invaded the scope of that privacy expectation, then the search and seizure will be deemed illegal and the evidence gleaned cannot be used against the defendant.

The Fourteenth Amendment due process form of privacy is sometimes known as “the right to be left alone.”[vii] Cases analyzing privacy according to that amendment consider privacy to be a type of liberty interest under the due process clause. When doing this analysis, the courts ask whether the government is invading personal rights or actions (like birth control, marriage between people of different races, abortion, assisted suicide) that are “fundamental” or “implicit in the concept of ordered liberty.”[viii]

If the court does find that fundamental rights have been invaded, the government actors have to stop that invasion of privacy. So, if a government entity, for example a post office, had a sign in its restroom saying “no bathing allowed” and a court declared that private decisions about how and where to bathe are a fundamental right which this rule violated, then the rule would have to be eliminated and after that people would be allowed to bathe in that restroom.[ix]

Prosecutions for dealing drugs and masturbating in public restrooms have been ruled invalid when defendants were caught by police who peeked on them in private stalls.[x] But, as was shown above, the constitutional violations were connected to search and seizure privacy rather than due process privacy even though, similar to the due process cases involving birth control, abortion, and assisted suicide (none of which had any connection to public restrooms), they clearly involve people’s own use of their bodies.

Drug dealing and masturbating (probably charged as “public lewdness”) are more clearly defined and more harshly punished under crimes codes than bathing in a public restroom. But any lack of clarity about whether particular actions are illegal in public restrooms is really more relevant to the defense against the criminal charges than to a claim about constitutional rights. This is why people charged with misbehavior in public restrooms try to use a combination of constitutional defenses and criminal defenses. The criminal law defenses try to show that behavior wasn’t wrong and the constitutional law defenses try to show that no matter what the behavior was, the defendant did it with an expectation of privacy in the most private component of a public place.

[i] Kreimer v. Morristown, 958 F.2d 1242, 1262 (3d Cir. 1992) (“[A]s a limited public forum, the Library is obligated only to permit the public to exercise rights that are consistent with the nature of the Library and consistent with the government’s intent in designating the Library as a pubic forum. Other activities need not be tolerated.”).

[ii] People v. Anonymous, 415 N.Y.S.2d 921 (N.Y. Misc. 2d 1979).

[iii] Courts have come to recognize that a right to privacy exists for occupants of public bathroom stalls. This recognition has resulted in cases reversing convictions based on evidence obtained through observation in a public restroom because the evidence was gained in violation of these defendants’ reasonable expectation of privacy. See, e.g., People v. Dezek, 308 N.W.2d 652 (Mich. Ct. App. 1981) (reversing defendant’s conviction of “gross indecency” after he was found with another man in the bathroom); State v. Biggar, 716 P.2d 493 (Haw. 1986) (reversing a drug conviction initiated by an officer peering over the partition in the public bathroom to observe the defendant’s activities); State v. Casconi, 766 P.2d 397 (Or. Ct. App. 1988) (reversing conviction for public masturbation observed in a public bathroom); State v. Brown, 929 S.W.2d 588 (Tex. App. 1996) (reversing conviction for public masturbation observed in a public bathroom).

[iv] See the posts about interacting with the police for more information about police questioning and one’s legal rights.

[v] See the posts on courts for more of an explanation about bringing and proving criminal charges.

[vi] The Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause says: “No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law… .” U.S. Const. amend. XIV, § 1. The Fourth Amendment states: “The right of people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated … .” U.S. Const. amend. IV.

[vii] See, Olmsted v. U.S., 277 U.S. 438, 4788 (1928) (“[The drafters of our Constitution] conferred as against the Government, the right to be let alone, the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men.”); Publ Util. Comm. v. Pollak, 343 U.S. 451, 467 (1952)(Douglas, William O., dissenting) (“The right to be let alone is indeed the beginning of all freedom.”). See generally, Samuel D. Warren & Louis D. Brandeis, The Right to Privacy, 4 Harv. L. Rev. 193, 193 (1890) (“[T]he right to life has come to mean the right to enjoy life, the right to be let alone; the right to liberty secures the exercise of extensive civil privileges.”).

[viii] Palko v. Connecticut, 302 U.S. 319, 325 (1937).

[ix] In addition to bringing constitutional claims for civil rights issues, most people also claim that Title 42, section 1983 of the United States Code was violated. That is the law which entitles people to financial awards in court cases proving that their constitutional rights have been violated.

[x] See generally, Michael R. Flaherty, Annotation, Search and Seizure: Reasonable Expectations of Privacy in Public Restroom, 74 A.L.R. 4th 508 (1989).

Tag: restrooms

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