The Son-Of-Sam Law?

Question

I have heard about the Son of Sam Law that says that a person can not benifit from their crimes. They can't kill people and then sell a book about it.

Does this law apply to drug dealers?

If it does, how long would it apply for? I mean if the crime (dealing drugs) was a long time ago. Would the Son of Sam law run out at some point?

Answer 1

There is no federal law, so laws of this kind vary by state. Many of the original ones were actually found to be unconstitutional and overturned because they inhibited free speech and could be stretched to cover any number of things.

Current versions of these laws tend to take a different tack. Rather than prohibiting such works, they notify potential victims, who are then free to use civil courts to sue for damages and seize any profits and possibly prevent the work itself.

A good example of this is O.J. Simpson's recent hijinx. The law didn't prevent him from writing his speculative book, but the victim's family could and did sue and published it themselves.

This doesn't make things more straightforward, necessarily... civil limitation periods (usually called 'prescriptive periods' instead of 'statues of limitation') also vary greatly and can sometimes be lengthened or shortened by various courts. A time of decades is not particularly unusual.

After a long time, a plaintiff can have trouble, though. Even if someone admits to selling or giving someone else an illegal drug, how do you prove that one particular instance was the cause of a specified amount of trouble? Even when a person ODs from a drug it may not necessarily be the fault of the person who sold it, nor was that particular dose necessarily unsafe... it may have had more to do with the user's behaviour then and previously.

If you want to be sure, you might want to spend a couple hundred bucks and actually consult with an attourney in your area who will be familiar with all the quirks of the local system. A relatively small investment in the scheme of things.

Answer 2

What about OJ Simpson?