The Legal Aid Society litigated this landmark case to challenge a 23-year-old state law that banned loitering in major transportation centers and had been used to arrest thousands of homeless people in train stations and bus terminals per year. Throughout the 1980s, hundreds of people slept in Port Authority Bus Terminal and Penn Station every night. In 1988, the New York Court of Appeals unanimously struck down the law as unconstitutionally vague under the Due Process Clause of both the Federal and State Constitutions. The Court held that the Legislature was not entitled to “criminalize conduct that is inherently innocent merely because such conduct is ‘sometimes attended by improper motives,’ since to do so would be to inform the ordinary citizen that an otherwise innocent act is illegal.” People v. Bright, 71 N.Y.2d 376, 383 (1988) (citations omitted). The Court also found that the law ran afoul of the Fifth Amendment’s protections against self-incrimination: the provision “effectively deprive[d] the citizen of his constitutional right to remain silent, since his failure to speak will result in certain arrest under the statute.” Bright 71 N.Y.2d at 386.