City trying to evict innocent family from home

(Image courtesy Pixabay)

A lawsuit has been filed over an attempt by police officers in Granite City, Illinois, to evict an innocent family from their home against the wishes of even the landlord.

The family's offense?

To let a teen friend sleep on their sofa during a couple of cold winter nights, before they knew he would be accused of burglary.

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The Institute for Justice, which is defending the family, said Jessica Barron and Kenny Wylie were startled to hear a knock on the door of their home on a quiet street in the St. Louis suburb.

"The knock quickly turned into pounding and a call: 'Police, open up!' Adrenaline rushing, they told their kids to go to their rooms, and then went to the door to find a group of police officers standing on their porch. The officers were there to serve an eviction notice – not an eviction notice from their landlord (who knew nothing about it), but an eviction notice from the city."

IJ said a city ordinance allowed police to evict the family because one of the "household," a friend of their teen son who had stayed only a few nights, had committed a crime.

"No one should be punished for a crime someone else committed," said Robert McNamara, a senior attorney at the Institute for Justice. "That simple notion is at the heart of our criminal justice system – that we are all innocent until proven guilty. And yet Granite City is punishing an innocent family for a crime committed by someone they barely knew."

IJ and the family, along with landlord Bill Campbell, are suing the city.

The family said they gave the teen a place to sleep with the temperatures "plunging below zero." He left a short time later after Jessica caught him trying to steal from her.

She turned him in when she found him hiding in a crawl space while police were looking for him over an incident at a restaurant.

But under the city's "crime-free housing" requirement, IJ said, "private landlords are required (on pain of fines or revocation of their rental license) to evict an entire household of tenants if police believe any member – even a house guest – committed a crime,"

Jessica Barron said: "Buying a home isn’t an option for us, and with an eviction on our record, it’ll be nearly impossible to find another place to rent. I cannot believe we could end up homeless because we choose to open our home to someone in need – someone we trusted, but who was not the person he claimed to be."

Such "one-strike" laws became popular in public housing developments 30 years ago and were permitted by the Supreme Court, which also warned that the rules for private rentals would be different.

Nevertheless, Granite City imposed the rule.

"Your home is your castle, whether you own it or rent it, and a lease is no different than a deed in terms of the property rights it confers," said IJ attorney Sam Gedge. "The government cannot extinguish those rights just because it chooses not to respect them. No one thinks Granite City could get away with evicting a homeowner, or forcing their bank to foreclose on them just because a teenage roommate broke the law."