All rights reserved. “We’ve always said you can’t punish for thoughts alone, but now we really know what the thoughts are,” says Audrey Rogers, a law professor at Pace University who has taught the Valle case in class. On Tuesday, defense attorneys took jurors on a video tour of DarkFetishNet.com, a website at the heart of Valle’s case. Then it becomes almost comical.” She and her colleagues have petitioned the judge to throw out the verdict, arguing, in part, that the prosecution had turned it into a pre-crime case, scaring the jury with thoughts of what might happen. What makes the case doubly bizarre is that at the heart of the preposterous-sounding charges are serious and sobering issues: Is it illegal to think vile thoughts and chat about them on the Internet? Nothing.”, Even so, the defense understood the task ahead of them—how to make a jury get past the image of the Cannibal Cop. It also raised a difficult legal question: when does a person’s fantasizing about committing a crime cross the line into actual criminal conduct? And then there are the scores of To Catch a Predator–style stings. To avoid a possible shoot-out with an NYPD officer, they used a ruse to lure Valle into the hallway—calling his house phone and saying the car he had parked outside had been hit. Members use aliases and share photos and tell stories to one another as a sort of group fantasy exercise. Pentagon leaders, senators, campaign bigwigs, and career staff have all fallen ill — and at least one hospitalized. The website functions like mainstream social media networks and its creator, Russian Web entrepreneur Sergay Merenkov, likened it to Facebook in a videotaped deposition earlier in the week. Prosecutors saw this as further evidence that Valle’s plans were serious. See here for a complete list of exchanges and delays. “And this was the first time in my career I’d ever, for just a second, thought about keeping the handcuffs on.” She would think a lot about that moment later on, when considering what the jury would have to get past to decide if Valle’s thoughts alone were criminal. The gory details of the case against Valle were disturbing enough, at first, even to alarm his court-appointed lawyer. In all these cases, the police said they had physical evidence aside from e-mails to back up arrests. He was convicted a year later and faced life in prison plus five years for another charge: accessing the federal National Crime Information Center database without authorization. [6] He was found guilty of all charges in March 2013. He was a cheerful, moon-faced cop at a precinct in West Harlem; she was new in town, a young Teach for America recruit at an elementary school in East Harlem. Taken at their worst, they would be very alarming.”. It was produced for HBO Documentary Films and it premiered at the 2015 Tribeca Film Festival. “I was cool with it,” she told reporters. What’s also changed, perhaps, is the scale of certain crimes—not just 9/11 but Columbine, Aurora, and Sandy Hook—and the way technology has emboldened many to think that anyone with ill intent might be stopped before snapping into action. “Three different women were going to be kidnapped on Presidents’ Day,” says Edward Zas, another of Valle’s defense lawyers. While thoughts haven’t always been protected from prosecution (as the witch hunts and red scares and political detentions of many eras demonstrate), there was a time, more than a century ago, when even attempted crimes like theft and murder and kidnapping weren’t considered criminal activity: If you tried to pick someone’s pocket and there was no money in the pocket, then you couldn’t be prosecuted. And I guarantee you that on this same website they can find people you can go after.” The Valle case, in his view, demonstrates what happens when a prosecution takes place without any sense of what does and doesn’t constitute a dangerous mind. Legal instruments like institutionalization and sex-offender registration all share the goal of preventing crime from taking place, and for better or worse, they’re based on a psychiatric rationale. An agent placed a hand on his shoulder. I could hardly contain myself.” On August 24, they discussed ways that Valle might kidnap another woman, Kristen Ponticelli, a recent graduate of Valle’s old high school whom he never met personally (Valle’s lawyers assume he just noticed her photo on Facebook). Defense attorney Julia Gatto countered in summations that her client was playing a fantasy role online, and told jurors “we don’t convict human beings because of ugly thoughts ... even if they are police officers.”. User Ratings [1] The circuit court later affirmed the acquittal in December 2015, but the prosecution's appeal could yet go to the Supreme Court. He also makes preparations. It comes from us. “I noticed that there were two little files on the bottom,” she said, “so I clicked on them.” They were image files, and while the pictures themselves didn’t load, she was able to see the URL where they’d come from.

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