Eleventh Circuit rules Daytona Beach ordinance criminalizing requests for help is unconstitutional

Gainesville, Fla. — Southern Legal Counsel won yet another landmark First Amendment victory when the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit ruled June 25 that the City of Daytona Beach was violating the constitution with an ordinance criminalizing requests for help.

The three-judge panel found in Scott v. City of Daytona Beach that the city’s 2019 ordinance was based on the content of a person’s speech and that the city’s stated public health interests could be addressed by less speech-restrictive means.

The ordinance prohibited requests for immediate assistance at specific locations, including sidewalks, medians, roadways, city parking facilities and the entrances and exits of commercial property.

The Eleventh Circuit ruling cited Reed v. Town of Gilbert, in which the U.S. Supreme Court established that a speech restriction is content-based, and therefore presumptively unconstitutional, if “on its face” it “draws distinctions based on the message a speaker conveys.”

“The challenged provisions of Daytona Beach’s anti-panhandling ordinance are content-based because they target only one particular type of solicitation—namely, ‘demand[s] or request[s] made in person for an immediate donation of money or some other article of value,’” the ruling states.

The ruling noted, for example, that “whether the law restricts a speaker’s expression turns entirely on whether he makes a request for an immediate donation. So, for example, an individual standing at an intersection with a sign reading ‘Hungry—Please Help Me’ would violate the ordinance. But an individual standing in the same place with a sign imploring passersby to ‘Help Your Local Humane Society’ wouldn’t.”

Writing for the three-judge panel, Circuit Judge Kevin Newsom observed that panhandling can be “a matter of life and death.”

SLC Executive Director Jodi Siegel said that, in fact, plaintiffs Dennis Scott, Chad Driggers, Douglas Willis and George Rowland, solicited help as a means of survival and were threatened with arrest or arrested for doing so multiple times.

“We are thrilled that the Eleventh Circuit unanimously ruled that Daytona Beach’s panhandling ordinance violated the free speech of the plaintiffs so that they can now ask others for charity without the fear of arrest,” Siegel said. “While some of the subsections were not enjoined due to a lack of standing, we hope the City does the right thing and does not begin enforcing those sections, as they are clearly unconstitutional.”

The lawsuit follows others SLC has brought against Florida local governments whose ordinances criminalizing requests for charity were struck down, enjoined from enforcement, or repealed. Among those municipalities were Fort Lauderdale, Pompano Beach, Fort Myers, Tampa, West Palm Beach and Miami. 

In 2021, SLC won an important First Amendment victory when the Eleventh Circuit found unconstitutional the City of Fort Lauderdale's Park Rule 2.2 banning outdoor food sharing as a social service in public parks.