If the Supreme Court takes up Taylor v. Singleton, it could be the sum of all fears for the most vulnerable Americans.
Matt Ford at The New Republic:
Alabama and 19 other Republican-led states are asking the Supreme Court to blow up more than a century of First Amendment precedents. In their place, they are urging the high court’s conservative majority to replace them with an originalist history-and-tradition test that would wipe away many of the free speech protections that American currently enjoy. Taylor v. Singleton is ostensibly about whether Alabama can criminally punish a man for holding a sign asking for help under the First Amendment. Beneath the surface, however, the GOP attorneys general are hoping to pull off a counterrevolution against America’s rich, enduring tradition of free speech and expression. The case began with a homeless man in Montgomery, Alabama. Jonathan Singleton, who is indigent and unhoused, often holds up signs along the state’s highways and sidewalks to call attention to his plight. As a result, according to his lawyers, he has been cited six times for violating the state’s pedestrian solicitation statute.
The most recent sign barely counted as solicitation or begging: It simply read, “HOMELESS. Today it is me, tomorrow it could be you.” Singleton was holding up the sign on the grassy side of a highway exit when last cited. In 2020, he filed a federal lawsuit to challenge the Alabama solicitation ban, as well as a counterpart law that banned loitering “in a public place for the purpose of begging.” Efforts to criminalize homelessness have been met with a mixed reception at the Supreme Court. In June 2024, the justices held in Grants Pass v. Johnson that an Oregon city’s ordinance against sleeping and camping in public spaces did not violate the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment, even if the defendants had nowhere else to go. The high court’s decision overturned a Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals decision to the contrary and gave Western states broad latitude to criminalize homelessness. On the other hand, the Supreme Court has also struck down multiple state and local statutes that seek to criminalize public solicitation. In the 1980 case Village of Schaumburg v. Citizens for a Better Environment, for example, the court rejected a Chicago suburb’s ordinance that sought to restrict public solicitation unless a group in question met certain budgetary and licensing conditions. Such requirements, the court ruled, were too sweeping and poorly tailored to survive First Amendment scrutiny. Justice Byron White noted in his majority opinion that while the court had sometimes allowed states to ban commercial solicitation, it had generally resisted restrictions on charitable solicitations, even in residential neighborhoods, because doing so could infringe upon the solicitors’ free speech and free exercise rights.
Alabama’s ordinances covered a wide range of expressive signs and actions. The Alabama Law Enforcement Agency, or ALEA, one of the defendants in the Singleton case, “has made arrests under the begging statute for holding a sign that said ‘homeless anything will help’; for holding ‘a plastic jar’ for ‘Birmingham Restoration Ministries’; and for approaching vehicles with a hat in hand ‘in an effort to beg,’” Singleton’s lawyers told the high court. For that reason, it is unsurprising that the city of Montgomery and its police department reached settlements with Singleton at an early stage of the litigation. But the state of Alabama, which represented ALEA, did not settle. It first took a defeat in the district court to the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals, which sided with Singleton. A three-judge panel concluded last April that begging was constitutionally protected speech under the circuit’s prior precedents, in line with the Supreme Court’s solicitation rulings, and that it was bound by that precedent until the Supreme Court says otherwise.
Now Alabama has asked the Supreme Court to intervene and hopes to establish that begging is not a constitutionally protected right. “Governments need ‘the full panoply of tools in the policy toolbox’ to address the homelessness crisis plaguing their streets,” the state claimed in one of its briefs, quoting from the Supreme Court’s ruling in Grants Pass. “Regulating begging is one such tool, prophylactically turning off one spigot to downstream harms like public intoxication, drug abuse, and encampments before they happen.”
The Taylor v. Singleton court case that SCOTUS could take up could a big concern for the 1st Amendment and the rights of the unhoused.
