Arresting Thoughts

Maeve Roughton asks if it’s becoming a crime to think the wrong thoughts.

- Maeve Roughton

You are what you eat, but are you also what you think?Most legal, philosophical, and psychiatric minds would say no; but in the wake of hacking scandals that have exposed everything from politicians’ sexual indiscretions to flesh-eating fantasies, public perception nips at the contrary.

For proof of this, we needn’t look any further than the case of former NYPD officer Gilberto Valle, dubbed the ‘Cannibal Cop’ by New York City’s ever-creative bold-face journalists. After public outrage demanded the criminal prosecution of an imagination that was wholly bizarre but hardly unlawful, he was convicted in 2013 of conspiracy to kidnap and for illegally accessing NYPD databases to engage in graphic online communications about kidnapping, killing, and eating women, crimes that he had never acted upon. In December 2015, the 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals concluded that Valle’s actions weren’t criminal, overturning his conviction, and declaring, “We are loath to give the government power to punish us for our thoughts and not our actions. That includes the power to criminalize an individual’s expression of sexual fantasies, no matter how perverse or disturbing. Fantasizing about committing a crime, even a crime of violence against a real person whom you know, is not a crime.”