BOULDER - “The ACLU of Colorado is disappointed that the City of Boulder has decided to add its name to the long and growing list of municipalities around the state that have responded to poverty on their streets and in their public spaces by increasing surveillance, adding new criminal penalties, and giving more tools to police and municipal judges to push homeless and poor people out of their communities.
“Two years ago, in a letter supporting the Boulder City Council’s decision to eliminate jail time for a number of minor offenses, many of which are unevenly enforced against the homeless and poor, the ACLU of Colorado Boulder County chapter wrote that ‘Incarceration is an extreme violation of liberty and should be reserved for the most serious violations and violators.’ At the time, the Council agreed.
“Now, just two years later, the Council has reversed that decision and plans to use the new ordinances to ‘take back public spaces’ by pushing disfavored members of the public out of them. Pushing the homeless out of one location only increases the problem of homelessness in other locations. Rather than spending public resources on more aggressive law enforcement, harassment, and incarceration, communities like Boulder would be better served by focusing that funding on programs that actually address and help to solve root causes of poverty.”

DENVER – The American Civil Liberties Union of Colorado filed suit this morning challenging an anti-panhandling ordinance recently approved by the City of Grand Junction.  According to the ACLU complaint, the ordinance bans a wide swath of speech that is protected by the First Amendment.

Although Grand Junction officials have claimed that the ordinance aims only at “aggressive” panhandling, the ACLU contends that most of the provisions are written so broadly that they also apply to peaceful, non-intrusive requests for assistance, such as a person sitting silently with a sign seeking a donation.

The law prohibits all panhandling after sunset and in any of a dozen additional locations and situations specified in the ordinance, such as within 100 feet of a bus stop or a school.

The ACLU lawsuit, which seeks to stop enforcement of the ordinance before it goes into effect on Sunday, March 23, was filed on behalf of five individuals, including a street performer and a former member of the US Coast Guard, as well as Humanists Doing Good, a local nonprofit organization.   All engage in peaceful expression that the new ordinance has unjustifiably made a crime punishable by up to one year in jail, according to the ACLU.

Among the speech banned by the ordinance is any solicitation of a person defined as “at risk,” a category that broadly includes all persons over 70 and all persons with mental or physical disabilities.

“The only conceivable reason for banning polite, non-intimidating solicitation of older and disabled persons is a mistaken and stigmatizing view that they cannot make their own decisions with their money,” said Silverstein.

According to the lawsuit, the city’s true goal is not to target aggressive panhandling but to provide police with a tool they can use to tell homeless persons and poor panhandlers to move on and to reduce the presence of impoverished beggars in Grand Junction.

“Although the ordinance technically applies to Girl Scouts selling cookies, Salvation Army bell ringers, street musicians seeking donations, petition circulators gathering signatures, and commercial vendors, the true targets of this measure are homeless and poor persons asking for financial assistance, even when they do so in a polite, courteous, and nonthreatening manner,” said Mark Silverstein, ACLU Legal Director.

The ACLU of Colorado has a long history of opposing laws that target the homeless and limit speech protected by the First Amendment, including a successful challenge in late 2012 of a sweeping ordinance that designated 12 blocks of Colorado Springs as a “no-solicitation” zone.  The ordinance was repealed after a federal judge’s preliminary ruling found that it was “likely unconstitutional.”

Today’s lawsuit, filed in federal district court in Denver, requests a temporary restraining order and a preliminary injunction, along with an expedited hearing.  In addition to Silverstein, the plaintiffs are represented by ACLU staff attorneys Sara Neel and Rebecca Wallace.

more on this case

The Denver Post editorial board’s suggestion that Colorado leave the issue of solitary confinement to prison officials is an approach that has been tried for three decades and, until very recently, has failed.
Colorado Department of Corrections Director Rick Raemisch has made commendable progress toward reducing the use of prolonged solitary confinement, particularly for prisoners with serious mental illness. But change in DOC leadership at some point in the future is not merely a possibility; it is a certainty. Binding legislation with clear definitions is critical to ensure that future leadership does not use ambiguities in the law as currently drafted to drive Colorado back into the dark days when locking prisoners with serious mental illness in a box for 23-plus hours a day was viewed as sound correctional practice.
While the ACLU of Colorado supports the symbolic importance of the proposed solitary legislation and does not doubt the resolve of Raemisch, we encourage legislators to employ some skepticism in judging whether this legislation, without clear definitions, is sufficient to bind future administrations.
This letter to the editor appeared in the March 18th edition of Denver Post.

Original editorial can be found here.