Utah's version of the "Son of Sam" law, which prevents criminals from making money on their life stories, is in jeopardy and Utah lawmakers and prosecutors are scrambling to fix it.
If it can be fixed.At least three agencies are looking at ways to sidestep a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling that held that laws prohibiting crooks from making money from published or filmed accounts of their deeds violate constitutional guarantees of freedom of expression.
"That's going to be a tricky road," said Salt Lake lawyer Colin King, who unsuccessfully tried to use the statute to intervene in a divorce case involving Alta View Hospital standoff suspect Richard L. Worthington.
"There are some pretty important rights it runs afoul of - which of course I was not concerned about when I wanted to take advantage of it," King said.
Others see irony in a law that keeps criminals from making profits while the public, book and movie industries clamor for their sordid stories.
The Utah statute is modeled after a law adopted by New York lawmakers in the late 1970s to prevent "Son of Sam" serial killer David Berkowitz from being paid money for his story.
The New York law was struck down last month.
Though Utah's law has been apparently used just once - unsuccessfully - lawmakers want it on the books. Sen. Lyle Hillyard, R-Logan, who sponsored the original bill in 1986, has asked the Office of Legislative Research and General Counsel to find another way to seize crime- story profits.
Assistant legislative counsel Janetha Hancock believes it can be done.
"The court's ruling says the state has a compelling interest in compensating victims of crime," she said. "The problem is in singling out some types of crime profits."
Hancock said she hopes to draft legislation this year, perhaps based on a broader federal statute. Hillyard doubts he'll introduce it until next session.
Dan Davis directs the Office of Crime Victims Reparation, whose state-run trust paid $3.8 million to victims last year. He said the trust has never held a dime from a criminal's "life story proceeds."
"But we like the philosophy of it," he said. "We'd like to have a law in place."
Utah Attorney General Paul Van Dam and Paul Boyden, a spokesman for the Statewide Association of Prosecutors, also are interested in finding a way around the high court's ruling.
But defense lawyer Ron Yengich sees the problem as societal, not legal.
"The way around it is for the public to change its attitude," Yengich said. "It's the ABCs, the CBSs and the HBOs that want this kind of garbage. It's the public that buys it. I think it's tragic."
Yengich and his most notorious client, Mark Hofmann, have both been offered money for their versions of the Mormon documents forgery case that culminated in the 1985 bombing murders of Steven Christensen and Kathleen Sheets.
Both have turned them down, Yengich said.
"Mark or I receive an average of a letter a month from somebody," he said. "He concedes he was wrong. He's doing his time. He doesn't want to go into the facts, since all that can do is cause pain to the Christensen, Sheets and Hofmann families."
Victims deserve to be compensated, Yengich said, but more importantly they deserve to be left alone.
King's efforts on behalf of the family of Karla Roth, a nurse killed in the Alta View standoff last September, may have been the first time Utah's law has ever been used.
To anyone's knowledge, no convicted Utah criminal has made money through books or movies since convicted killer Gary Gilmore sold rights to his life story in 1976. That agreement led to Norman Mailer's Pulitzer prize-winning book, "The Executioner's Song," and the movie of the same name.
King said the Roth family isn't as interested in getting money from the Worthingtons as in making sure the accused killer and his ex-wife don't reap "what they consider to be blood money."
King unsuccessfully sought to amend Richard and Karen Worthington's divorce decree to require them to pay any money from movie or book rights into the state fund for victims.
What he found was that nobody seemed to know just who was responsible for enforcing the so-called "notoriety for profit" statute.
"I acted literally as a private attorney general to enforce a law deemed public policy," he said.
Then came the Supreme Court ruling on Dec. 10 that effectively blocked King's effort to employ the "Son of Sam" law. Instead, he filed a wrongful death lawsuit against Karen Worthington that is pending.
That was also the course of action taken by the family of slain polygamist Rulon Allred against Rena Chynoweth, who admitted in a 1990 book that she shot Allred in 1977 at the behest of rival sect leader Ervil LeBaron.
Chynoweth had been acquitted of the killing in 1979.
The Allreds' attorney, James McConkie, said he considered and rejected the "Son of Sam" statute since damages in a wrongful-death lawsuit would not be restricted to profits from the book.
"We decided it wasn't the way to go," McConkie said of the pending lawsuit. "In retrospect, we were very fortunate."