Panhandlers Hope Supreme Court Will Be Generous : Homeless: Calling them a ‘menace,’ a New York court upholds a ban on aggressive beggars in the subway. But advocates plan another appeal.

As tens of thousands of rush-hour commuters jostled each other out of the subway Friday morning, few noticed the shabby, gray-haired man named Bill who stood alongside a doughnut stand in Grand Central Station, wordlessly jingling coins in a battered paper cup.

Occasionally, someone would pause and drop him a nickel or a quarter. At this rate, Bill said, he would probably make $4 in the next few hours.

In one New York federal judge’s opinion, what Bill was doing is an expression of his constitutional right to free speech, to be protected by the courts just as they have defended the rights of religious and charitable groups to solicit donations in public places.

An outstretched hand holding a cup “cannot but remind the passer-by that people in the city live in poverty and often lack the essentials for survival,” Judge Leonard B. Sand wrote last January.

But an appeals court overturned that ruling Thursday, saying panhandling “amounts to nothing less than a menace to the common good.” Two of the three justices voted to uphold a ban on begging in the labyrinthine subway system through which 3.5 million New Yorkers travel daily, as well as in the railroad stations that serve hundreds of thousands of suburbanite commuters.

“It seems fair to say that most individuals who beg are not doing so to convey any social or political message,” the justices wrote. “Rather, they beg to collect money.”

Homeless advocates say they expect to appeal this case to the U.S. Supreme Court, where it could be the first federal test of whether the Constitution affords protection to an occupation that dates back earlier than biblical times. Meanwhile, the transit authority said Friday that it plans to step up its enforcement of the panhandling ban, which had been relaxed pending the outcome of the case.

A similar case has been filed in federal court in San Francisco, where Celestus Blair Jr., a formerly homeless man arrested five times for begging, has challenged the city’s enforcement of a 1961 California law that bans accosting others to solicit alms. He argues that he did nothing more than ask people for help.

Margaret C. Crosby, an American Civil Liberties Union attorney representing Blair, said she believes the cases in New York and California are the only ones testing the issue in federal court, although several others have been filed elsewhere on the state level.

Crosby said the tightening restrictions on panhandling in cities across the nation are evidence that “there’s been a real backlash against the homeless. It reflects people’s frustration with society’s inability to deal with this problem. It’s understandable, but it’s unfortunate, because it’s certainly not going to deal with the root causes of homelessness.”

But New York’s Metropolitan Transit Authority says the problem is more than frustration--it is fear so great that it is driving passengers out of the subway system. In recent years, beggars have adopted more aggressive tactics, confronting passengers as they take out their money to pay for tokens or when they are trapped in the tight confines of a moving subway car.

A 1988 transit authority study indicated that two-thirds of subway riders have felt intimidated into giving money to panhandlers.

Douglas Lasdon, executive director of the Legal Action Center for the Homeless, which filed the class action suit against the transit authority, insisted that his organization does not defend such harassment. What it seeks, he said, is for the transit authority to treat panhandlers as it does charitable and religious groups, which are allowed to solicit only in areas where they do not interfere with the flow of commuter traffic and which are banned from making their pitches aboard subway cars.

Paul G. Chevigny, a New York University law professor who has written a book on freedom of expression, said the courts face a “very close question” in determining whether begging is a personal statement or a commercial endeavor. Still, he asserted that the appeals court probably had gone too far in allowing a total ban.

Meanwhile, Sgt. Robert Valentino, a spokesman for the 3,700-member transit authority police force, said that in the wake of the appeals court decision his agency has been “reinforcing and informing our members that we expect them to vigorously pursue the panhandling problem.” In most instances, that will mean ordering beggars to leave or issuing them summonses, he said.

“We will be aggressively trying to enforce (the ban) to try to ensure safe passage for the riding public,” Valentino said.

“We’re not saying this is going to be a cure-all,” he added. “We may just be moving the problem somewhere else.”