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Comment by adamsvystun | Hacker News Reader

> Carter ordered the City and County to provide offers of shelter within 90 days to all unaccompanied women and children in Skid Row; within 120 days shelter for all families there; and within 180 days shelter for everyone there. Further, he required them to offer housing and treatment services to all individuals within Skid Row who are in need of services from the Department of Mental Health or the Department of Public Health. He also required them to offer support services to all who accept shelter offers.

> Judge Carter ordered the city to place $1 billion in escrow; ordered the cessation of all sales or transfers of public lands;

Does the judge have the power to order such things?

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> Generally speaking, courts have ruled that individual residents do not have a right to demand aid from their government. However, there is one important exception: when the government was an active, willing, and knowing participant in creating the conditions that lead to the need for aid. This is known as the “state-created-danger” doctrine. Judge Carter invokes this as the primary justification for his sweeping order: that Los Angeles created layers of structural racism that deprived Black people of opportunity, and it had an explicit policy of concentrating the homeless population in Skid Row and then depriving them of services.

Seems like in limited circumstances where the government itself is implicated in harm, than yes.

> when the government was an active, willing, and knowing participant in creating the conditions that lead to the need for aid. This is known as the “state-created-danger” doctrine.

The state-created-danger doctrine does not mean any of those [1,2]. The law is about direct physical harm by the inaction of individual officers, not any vague policy implications. This judge's interpretation of the law is as crazy as his ideology.

1 https://www.hg.org/legal-articles/legal-doctrine-of-state-cr...

2 https://scholarship.law.duke.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article...

> direct physical harm by individual officers

No, it's not. Your own links directly contradict that; see, for example, the second paper and page 10 (not an officer of the law, not direct physical harm) and page 18 (officers of the law but no direct harm of any kind).

I didn't want to mean the harm was directly caused by the officer. Updated the language.

Well, you could quote the next paragraph as well:

> when the government was an active, willing, and knowing participant in creating the conditions that lead to the need for aid. This is known as the “state-created-danger” doctrine. Judge Carter invokes this as the primary justification for his sweeping order

Doesn't that also apply to every problem in society?

Yeah. This is this judge's over broadening interpretation of the law. If his logic follows, a judge can define any flaw in the society as a state created danger and the judge can create grand plans to fix any societal issues. Lol.

No, there are extensive factual findings in the order (based on evidence presented in the hearings so far in this case) as to how the particular harms at issue in this case were deliberately and knowingly sought by the government, both the deliberate racial discrimination and the freezing of it's consequences through the deliberate “containment” strategy in skid row.

Most social problems aren't the clearly demonstrable product of deliberate government choice of the harm in this way.

> Does the judge have the power to order such things?

The actual order is linked and has fairly extensive citations of precedent on that point, but, generally, yes, the federal courts have fairly extensive power to order equitable relief, even on a preliminary basis, where it finds actual (or, for preliminary orders, probable) Constitutional violations (and in some other cases, as well.)

Judges have tremendous discretionary power, limited mostly by explicit legislation and by the rulings of higher courts.

Well... in theory they are limited that way. In practice they can do whatever they want and chock up the discrepancies to "mistakes" in applying the law. Then the loser has to spend thousands on an appeal to get a chance at justice. Also, any investigation into those "mistakes" and any true misconduct are usually so protected that their secrecy outweigh your right to any exculpatory evidence contained in them. Makes you wonder how widespread the mistakes and misconduct are that they want to keep it a secret...

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