Revised begging ban to be argued

Questions about whether it is legal in Arkansas to hold up signs in public places begging for food or money, and under what circumstances this may be done, will be aired at 9:30 a.m. Tuesday in a Little Rock federal courtroom.

U.S. District Judge Billy Roy Wilson has scheduled a hearing to decide whether to block the enforcement of a recently rewritten state law that the American Civil Liberties Union of Arkansas says continues to unconstitutionally ban begging but that the state says only disallows begging in limited circumstances, making it constitutional.

In a lawsuit filed Aug. 7, the ACLU contends that revisions made during the 2017 legislative session to Section (A)(3) of Arkansas Code Annotated 5-71213 don’t resolve the constitutionality problem that caused Wilson to invalidate that section of the law last fall. Wilson’s ruling in November was in response to a lawsuit the ACLU had filed a month earlier. Until then, the law had been on the books for about 30 years but had never been challenged.

The previous version of the law made it illegal for a person to “linger or remain in a public place or on the premises of another for the purpose of begging.”

By singling out loitering “for the purpose of begging,” the law violated the First Amendment, Wilson found.

Under a U. S. Supreme Court decision handed down in 2000, any law that regulates speech on the basis of its content must be narrowly tailored to promote a compelling government interest in order to be constitutional.

In this case, the only speech that was outlawed was asking for charity, and Wilson said the state didn’t show that outlawing that type of speech served a valid state interest.

In his November ruling, Wilson noted that the state had asked him to abstain from deciding the matter because the Arkansas Supreme Court “might someday interpret the anti-begging law” in a way that avoids constitutional concerns in the way it is applied.