There are Son of Sam laws in several states, but they have to be written very narrowly to avoid First Amendment problems. (The original one, in New York, was struck down, and they wrote a narrower version later.) There’s no restriction against prisoners publishing stuff that’s unrelated to their crimes. And they can still publish things related to their crimes, but they may not be able to be compensated for it.
Aha, found it
That’s a different issue. Manson was sued in civil court by the families of his victims and they won a large financial judgement against him. But Manson didn’t pay the judgement because he didn’t have the money. However, the existence of the judgement made it possible for the family to claim any money Manson earned in the future. Manson never wrote a book but he did get some royalties from music he had written and the families were able to take this.
famous MLK Jr letter from jail:
But - the wiki article reads like he had to write and secretly pass his writings to his lawyers to get the text out of the jail. This is not surprising considering the circumstances of his arrest and the tenor of the times, and the fierce urgency of his message.
Sir Thomas Malory wrote Le Morte d’Arthur in prison, and John Bunyan started The Pilgrim’s Progress in prison.
From an Aussie point of view it would be remiss not to mention Chopper Read.
Here are a few webpages about things written in prison:
And a webpage about other things done in prison:
Where no laws exists to prevent a convict from profiting from a book about his crime … the presiding judge can impose this restriction on the convict. I see from above this has been challenged on constitutional grounds but I’m not sure how well that would fly.
There are some state laws, yes, but not blanket federal law. And they only restrict earnings from the writing, not the writing or publishing itself.
I think it makes sense to have such a law to prevent people from profiting from crime.
Weirdest and most awful case of criminal authorship and profit from it: “If I Did It” by OJ Simpson.
Simpson lost a civil trial but was acquitted at his criminal trial. There was no criminal authorship whatsoever involved.
Note that Simpson didn’t write If I Did It in prison or anyplace else. A ghostwriter, Pablo Fenjves, wrote it (apparently) before Simpson was even consulted about the book. Fenjves was a screenwriter/ghostwriter who was a neighbor of Simpson and who testified at the criminal trial about one fact. It’s not clear if Fenjves or the publisher, ReganBooks, originally came up with the idea of him writing the book, but Simpson (apparently) had nothing to do with it. He just agreed, after the book had been written and before it was published, to put his name on it for a payment of $600,000:
Obviously, varies by state. In Vermont, people in prison can even vote. I seem to recall that in some cases, the court has the power to specify in sentencing that the convicted person may not have personal financial gain from the publication of anything related to the crime. But I can’t think of any keywords that would point to a cite.
My father in law wrote his first of several dozen novels while in prison, but I don’t know if he published them and received royalties from them while still incarcerated. Some of his titles now sell on Amazon for over $100.
The same thing happened here as happened in the Manson case. The profits from the book were given to the Goldman family as part of a previous civil judgement against Simpson.
I don’t think it would fly at all. Judges can’t simply invent their own sentences. The sentences they can impose are defined by laws.
You might sometimes hear about a judge giving an eccentric sentence but I think in all these cases you’d find the defendant was facing a much harsher normal sentence and therefore voluntarily agreed to comply with some unusual alternative.
I meant that he “wrote” this from prison. True, it was for an unrelated crime.
Didn’t know that about Manson.
Well, yeah, I saw that, and that’s possible, but it’s possible that it’s Simpson’s way of keeping his distance and maintaining plausible deniability. We can’t know for sure that he had something to do with the book, though, so it should all be read with a grain of salt.
Yes, that makes complete sense, thanx for adding this.
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The Goldman family is receiving the royalties from Chucky Manson’s book ???