The American Civil Liberties Union is challenging Prince William County’s loitering law, the latest in a series of fights against such measures.
The case stems from a May incident in which four Hispanic men were arrested while standing near their apartment complex in Manassas.
“Unfortunately, the imprecision of the Prince William loitering ordinance gives police the leeway to apply it to almost any circumstance they wish, enabling them to enforce it against disfavored groups,” said ACLU of Virginia Legal Director Rebecca Glenberg.
The Prince William County loitering ordinance makes it unlawful to loiter “under circumstances which justify a reasonable suspicion that such person may be engaged in, or is about to engage in, a crime, or with the purpose of begging.”
“No one should be subject to arrest simply for standing peacefully on a public sidewalk,” Glenberg said. “This ordinance allows police to arrest anyone they deem ‘suspicious,’ without any evidence of actual wrongdoing.”
Loitering has been a prickly issue for the Washington suburbs in recent years. The Herndon Town Council last August pursued using a state anti-loitering statute to curb the number of day laborers gathering at the intersection of Elden Street and Alabama Drive, but town Attorney Richard Kaufman nixed the plan.
“Many courts have invalidated loitering ordinances,” Kaufman said in a confidential memo to the council. “The main grounds of invalidation hold that the loitering ordinances violate due process of law or free expression rights because they are so vague that the public does not know what is illegal or so broad that even innocent conduct is rendered illegal.”
He added that the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that general loitering ordinances are void on due process grounds for vagueness and being too broad.
The memo was made public after Herndon Mayor Steve DeBenedittis and the town council waived their attorney-client privilege.
In 2007, Gaithersburg proposed an anti-loitering ordinance to curb the gathering of workers at a day-laborer site, but it, too, was struck down.
The Prince William case is scheduled to be heard Sept. 1 in the county’s General District Court.
