In Alabama’s pending appeal, the state argues that panhandling was widely criminalized in the country’s founding and should not enjoy protected speech under the First Amendment.
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WASHINGTON – Two years after the Supreme Court said cities can punish homeless people who sleep in public places, Alabama is asking the high court to end protections for public panhandlers.
Constitutional issues are different. In 2024, the court said that fines or imprisonment for sleeping outdoors when there are no available shelter beds does not violate the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment.
In Alabama’s pending appeal, the state argues that panhandling was widely criminalized in the country’s founding and should not enjoy protected speech under the First Amendment.
This legal strategy may be unexpected, but Alabama is hoping a judge will want to hear its appeal for one of the same reasons the Oregon City sleep ban was taken up: local governments’ pleas to help with the nation’s growing homelessness problem.
“Our cities cannot respond to this crisis without fully leveraging their traditional police powers,” Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall told the court, backed by 19 Republican attorneys general from other states.
“Today it’s me, tomorrow it could be you.”
Alabama asked the court to determine whether the Constitution prevents broad bans on panhandling, such as two Alabama laws previously successfully challenged by Jonathan Singleton, a homeless man from Montgomery, Alabama.
Singleton was charged six times with violating a state law against soliciting donations, including by holding up a sign that read “Homeless. Today it’s me, tomorrow it could be you” while standing in the grass near a freeway exit.
Violators can face fines of up to $500 and three months in jail under the anti-begging law, and fines of up to $100 and 10 days in jail under the law against soliciting donations from people in vehicles.
Lower court blocks Alabama panhandling ban
Lower courts blocked enforcement of the law after Singleton filed a class action lawsuit in 2020.
Based in Atlanta 11th The Circuit Court of Appeals’ 2025 decision cited a previous ruling in another Florida case that held panhandling is speech protected by the First Amendment.
The three-judge panel said Alabama’s law differs from Fort Lauderdale’s ban on panhandling on beaches, which an appeals court upheld in 1999 because Fort Lauderdale’s regulations were not citywide.
In an appeal that includes several references to a 2024 Supreme Court ruling on the outdoor sleeping ban, Alabama argued that cities and states need more leeway to deal with panhandling amid a “dramatic increase” in the homelessness crisis and public demand for panhandling responses.
“At the time of the founding, states generally prohibited idleness, wandering without errands or permanent residence, and begging in the streets,” Marshall writes. “The basic theory inherited from the British was to distinguish between those who could work (but refused) and those who could not.”
Court says panhandling is protected by the First Amendment
Singleton’s lawyers, some of whom work for the Southern Poverty Law Center and the National Homeless Law Center, counter that the historic law cited by Alabama “criminalizes acts of voluntary inaction, not the communicative aspects of panhandling.”
And Singleton’s lawyers said that even if it covered panhandling, First Amendment protections did not depend on what laws were in place at the time.
That’s why Alabama’s argument runs contrary to the position taken by courts across the country and the Supreme Court’s “long and continuing precedent recognizing that speech seeking charitable relief is protected by the First Amendment,” the Alabama lawyers wrote.
In filing the lawsuit in 2020, the Southern Poverty Law Center said Alabama “should devote more resources to housing, shelter, and medical care to meet these needs, rather than jailing or ticketing those seeking help.”
The Supreme Court is scheduled to consider Alabama’s appeal in closed session on February 20th. Four of the nine justices must want to hear the case accepted for retrial.
Courts dismiss the vast majority of the thousands of appeals they receive each year.
