When a young couple left the Giant Eagle grocery in Homestead Boro, Pa., one fall day two years ago, a police car nearly hit them in the crosswalk. They jumped out of the path of the car, and the flustered young woman, Amy Johnston, 27, swore angrily at the driver.

Enraged by the expletive she used, Homestead Boro Police Officer Francis Keyes slammed on his brakes and chased them down. Then he placed them in handcuffs and arrested them for disorderly conduct. The crime: Using bad language.

The two took their case to U.S. District Court in Pittsburgh in July, and this week they won. Homestead Boro on Monday agreed to pay them $5,000 each for, among other things, unlawful arrest.

Pennsylvania law specifically prohibits “obscene language or gestures,” and civil rights advocates say that at least a half-dozen people are being arrested for such impolite expression every year in western Pennsylvania and probably many more. The issue is important to defenders of free speech, and it has been cropping up in other states, including the well-known 1998 case of Michigan’s “cussing canoeist.”

In the Pennsylvania complaint, Johnston, a Chatham University student and part-time nanny, and Gregory Lagrosa, 29, a library assistant and part-time graduate student at the University of Pittsburgh, alleged that the Homestead Boro Police Department had a pattern or policy of authorizing its officers to arrest people illegally under Pennsylvania’s disorderly conduct status. Several witnesses had protested to the officer, saying that the students had done nothing wrong on that day, Nov. 26, 2000.

“This is an important victory,” said Witold Walczak, executive director of the Pittsburgh affiliate of the American Civil Liberties Union. He was also one of the attorneys for the two. Neither the officer nor any Homestead Boro officials would comment Monday.

“We need to educate police officers that they’re not Miss Manners and they cannot send people to jail simply for using naughty language,” Walczak said. “The police have far more important responsibilities, such as fighting crime and terrorism.”

In a separate incident, a second federal lawsuit filed in July by Pennsylvania’s ACLU involves Erica Upshaw, 28, a mother of three, who was pulled over in July 2000 for allegedly running a stop sign in North Braddock, a suburb of Pittsburgh.

A police officer told Upshaw that her car was going to be towed because they believed she had a suspended license, although her license was valid.

When she responded with an epithet not directed at the officer, but describing the quality of her day Upshaw, a school-bus driver and church school counselor at the time of the incident, was arrested for disorderly conduct. As in the other case, a judge subsequently dismissed all charges. Upshaw’s lawsuit is ongoing.