Wiseguy: NICHOLAS PILEGGI.

• Author: Rommelmann, Nancy

My nonfiction book about a mother throwing her young children from a bridge occasionally prompts comments such as: "If you don't give every penny in sales to the surviving children, you're a monster." While I appreciate that people find the idea of making money from misery unforgivable, our media diets would be slim indeed were we to forbid creators from profiting off tragic circumstances. Everything from the Bible to the true-crime lineup on the Investigation Discovery network, whose combined readership/viewership I'll put at roughly infinity, would be off the table.

The rationale behind New York's Son of Sam law, also known as a "notoriety-for-profit" law, was to keep convicted criminals from profiting off writing about their crimes, whether directly or through an amanuensis. State legislators hustled through the law almost immediately after the arrest of David Berkowitz, who'd been dubbed the "Son of Sam" during his 1976-77 killing spree. Fearing Berkowitz would peddle his story to publishers (he didn't), the law authorized the state to seize any monies earned through such a project and turn them over to the victims, which might be the very definition of adding insult to injury.

Simon & Schuster, publishers of the 1985 book Wiseguy, challenged the Son of Sam law as violating the First Amendment rights of mobster-turned-informant Henry Hill. This came after New York state claimed it was entitled to the $92,250 the publisher had paid Hill for his...