A three-judge panel of the famously odd 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco has thrown out a 37-year-old ordinance that Los Angeles police have been using to clear homeless people off the streets.

The panel ruled 2-1 Friday that the Eighth Amendment, barring cruel and unusual punishment, prohibits Los Angeles "from punishing involuntary sitting, lying, or sleeping on public sidewalks that is an unavoidable consequence of being human and homeless without shelter."

Some 10,000 to 12,000 homeless people now live near new condominiums and apartment buildings that have arisen in an explosion of gentrification east of downtown Los Angeles. The ruling said there was shelter for 9,000 to 10,000 homeless people in that area, leaving about 1,000 or more people without a roof over their heads.

"So long as there are a greater number of homeless individuals in Los Angeles than the number of available beds, the city may not enforce" the ordinance, the judges declared.

At first glance, the ruling appears humane. After all, being down on your luck is not a crime.

In fact, though, the judges' underlying premises here turn out on closer examination to be bizarre and almost unsupportable. Once large bands of homeless people colonize public spaces such as parks, sidewalks and libraries, those areas are effectively denied to the very taxpayers who fund them. The potential problems with sanitation, disease and public health should be obvious.

The judges do not really mean there are 1,000 too few beds in Los Angeles; they mean there are 1,000 too few free beds. Yes, adults have a right to become winos. But they have no right to compel anyone else to finance their folly -- nor can they delegate any such nonexistent right to government (as even this 9th Circuit ruling admits).

Even more bizarre is the assertion here that arresting people who have set up housekeeping on the sidewalks, using the streets as their toilets, somehow constitutes "cruel and unusual punishment."

In light of Friday's ruling, Southern Nevada governments should now reconsider their policy of targeting the homeless by "sweeping" homeless encampments and "selectively enforcing" the laws, argues Allen Lichtenstein, general counsel for the ACLU of Nevada.

Las Vegas also has a "shortage of beds" for the homeless population here, points out Nevada ACLU Executive Director Gary Peck. Mr. Peck also appears to mean "free beds."

But in fact, while the 9th Circuit's rulings generally do apply in Nevada, the appeals court judges specifically cited the current Las Vegas ordinance -- under which bums are held to be breaking the law only if they obstruct pedestrians or vehicles -- as a good example of how a city can "avoid criminalizing" homelessness.

Therefore, "We're going to continue to enforce our ordinance until a court of competent jurisdiction tells us otherwise," Las Vegas City Attorney Brad Jerbic said.

Good.