By JESSE BIRNBAUM/Reported by Wendy Cole

New York State law restricts criminals from profiting from their crimes by selling their story to publishers or the movies. Too bad for Jean Harris, the onetime private-school headmistress, who is serving 15 years to life for the 1980 shooting murder of her lover, Scarsdale Diet author Herman Tarnower. Harris wrote an autobiography, Stranger in Two Worlds, and wants to donate the $98,000 she earned from the book to a fund for prisoners' children, but the state court of appeals said forget about it. Tarnower's surviving relatives have five years in which to lay claim to the money; otherwise it could revert to Harris.