Nevada High Court Strikes Down Son of Sam Law

Another state supreme court has struck down its state’s Son of Sam law.  Nevada’s Supreme Court has ruled its law unconstitutional in Seres v. Lerner, 120 Nev. Adv. Op. No. 95 (Dec. 21, 2004), in which the author of You Got Nothing Coming, Notes from a Prison Fish, challenged NRS 217.007 which allowed the sister of his victim to recover “any monetary proceeds [he] might generate from published materials based upon or substantially related to the offense.” Looking to Simon & Schuster (502 U.S. 105 (1991)), the high court determined that “if the proposed expression’s contents must be reviewed in order to determine whether the statute applies, then the statute is a content-based restriction on speech.” Further, it “places a direct financial burden only on speech with a specified and particular content, that being reference to the felony itself. Because NRS 217.007 is a content-based restriction on speech, the statute must pass a strict scrutiny level of review…” While finding that Nevada had a compelling interest in compensating crime victims for their losses, the court held that the means provided for in the statute to achieve the goal was not narrowly tailored. “…[A]lthough NRS 217.007 does not restrict a felon from engaging in whatever speech or expression he desires, it penalizes that speech based upon its discrete content by seizing all proceeds, regardless of the extent to which the work relates to the crime against the victim. This breadth of content violates Simon & Schuster.”

The California Son of Sam statute to which the Nevada court refers in its opinion is back in the news, albeit in a revised form. Sharon Rocha, the mother of Laci Peterson, has gone to court to try to bar Scott Peterson from profiting from any book or movie deals he might obtain, even though he has now been convicted in the deaths of his wife and son Connor. (Susan Heredeen, Rocha Pressing Civil Lawsuit, Modesto Bee, January 25, 2005).