Court upholds ‘Son of Sam’ law

Friday, May 28, 1999 | 9:35 a.m.

The state law is narrower than New York's "Son of Sam" law, struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1991, and can be applied legally to felons who committed their crimes before the law passed, said the 2nd District Court of Appeal.

The ruling was issued only a day after the case was argued.

The 1986 California law requires convicted felons who sell their stories for articles, books, television appearances or films to surrender the proceeds. Victims have five years to claim the money as compensation for damages they suffered, and after that the balance goes to the state.

The law was challenged by Barry Keenan, leader of three kidnappers who abducted the 19-year-old Sinatra from Harrah's Casino at Lake Tahoe in 1963. He was released unharmed after a ransom payment.

Keenan, who blamed his actions on drugs and alcohol, spent less than five years in prison and now is a land developer in Mississippi.

After a magazine interview with Keenan was published last year, he and the writer sold the movie rights to Columbia pictures. But Sinatra got a court order preventing the studio from paying Keenan while the suit was pending.

Thursday's 3-0 ruling bars the studio from paying Keenan and requires it to set any payments aside for his victim.

The court rejected Keenan's argument that the law violates free speech by suppressing criminals' accounts of their past.

That argument was upheld by the Supreme Court against the "Son of Sam" law, named after the serial killer whose murder case led to its passage. The high court said the law applied to anyone whose story included admission of a crime, even if no charges had ever been filed, and would have covered such works as the Autobiography of Malcolm X and Henry David Thoreau's "Civil Disobedience."

In Thursday's ruling, the court said the defects found in the New York law were absent from the California law. That law applies only to people who have been convicted of a felony, or acquitted by reason of insanity, and only to stories about their crimes, not to any story that makes a "passing mention" of the crime, the court said.

The court also said application of the 1986 law to a 1963 felon did not violate the constitutional ban on "ex post facto" laws, those that impose punishment after a crime.

The purpose of California's law is not to punish, but instead "to prevent convicted criminals from profiting from their own wrongs, and to redirect such profits to those who were victimized," said the opinion by Justice Miriam Vogel.

Sinatra's lawyer, Richard B. Specter, said he was gratified by the speed and unanimity of the ruling.

"It demonstrates that the Legislature knew what it was doing," he said.

Keenan's lawyer, Stephen F. Rohde, had left for the day when his office was called by The Associated Press.