Does the Constitution Protect Begging? Supreme Court Asked to Decide

Two years after the Supreme Court said cities can punish homeless people for sleeping in public places, Alabama wants the high court to end protections for public begging.

The constitutional issues are different. In 2024, the court said fining or jailing someone for sleeping outside when there are no available shelter beds doesn’t violate the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment.

In Alabama’s pending appeal, the state argues begging was widely criminalized at the start of the nation and so it should not be protected speech under the First Amendment.

While the legal strategy may be a longshot, Alabama hopes the justices will want to hear its appeal for one of the same reasons an Oregon city’s sleeping ban was taken up: local governments’ pleas for help with the nation’s growing homelessness problem.

“Our cities cannot manage this crisis without the full measure of their traditional police powers,” Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall told the court in an appeal backed by 19 GOP attorneys general from other states.

‘Today it is me, tomorrow it could be you’

Alabama has asked the court to decide whether the Constitution prevents broad bans on panhandling, such as two Alabama laws successfully challenged so far by Jonathan Singleton, a homeless resident of Montgomery.

Singleton was cited six times for violating a state law against soliciting contributions, including for holding a sign that read “HOMELESS. Today it is me, tomorrow it could be you” while standing in the grass near a highway exit.

Violators can be punished with fines up to $500 and three months in jail under one anti-begging law and with fines starting at up to $100 and 10 days in jail under a law against soliciting contributions from people in cars.

Alabama’s begging bans blocked by lower courts

After Singleton filed a class action lawsuit in 2020, lower courts blocked enforcement of the laws.

The Atlanta-based 11th Circuit Court of Appeals’ 2025 ruling cited its previous decision in a different case from Florida that begging is speech protected by the First Amendment.

A three-judge panel said Alabama’s laws are different from a ban on panhandling on Fort Lauderdale’s beaches that the appeals court upheld in 1999 because Fort Lauderdale’s restrictions weren’t citywide.

In an appeal that includes several references to the Supreme Court’s 2024 decision on outdoor sleeping bans, Alabama argues cities and states need more leeway to address panhandling amid the homelessness crisis and a “dramatic growth” in public demand for dealing with begging.

“At the founding, States commonly prohibited idleness, wandering about with no course of business or fixed residence, begging in the streets, and the like,” Marshall wrote. “The basic theory, inherited from the English, was to distinguish those who could work (but refused) from those who could not.”

Courts have said begging is protected by First Amendment

Lawyers for Singleton, some of whom work for the Southern Poverty Law Center and the National Homelessness Law Center, counter that the historic laws Alabama cites “criminalized the conduct of voluntary idleness, not the communicative aspect of begging.”

And even if they did cover begging, Singleton’s lawyers said, First Amendment protections aren’t determined by what laws were on the books at a single moment in time.

That’s why Alabama’s argument cuts against the position taken by courts across the country and against the Supreme Court’s “long and unbroken line of precedent recognizing that speech seeking charitable relief is protected by the First Amendment,” his lawyers wrote.

When initiating the lawsuit in 2020, the Southern Poverty Law Center said Alabama “should dedicate more resources to housing, shelter and health care that would meet those needs rather than jailing or ticketing people that ask for help.”

Alabama’s appeal is scheduled to be considered by the Supreme Court at a closed-door conference on Feb. 20. Four of the nine justices must want to hear a case for it to be accepted for review.

The court rejects the vast majority of the thousands of appeals it receives each year.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Does the Constitution protect begging? Supreme Court asked to decide

Reporting by Maureen Groppe, USA TODAY / USA TODAY

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