3/12/13
A New York police officer was convicted on Tuesday in a bizarre plot to kidnap, torture, kill and eat women.
The officer, Gilberto Valle, 28, could be sentenced to life in prison for one count of kidnapping conspiracy.
The verdict came on the 12th day of his trial in United States District Court in Manhattan.
The officer was also convicted of illegally gaining access to a law enforcement database that prosecutors said he had used to conduct research on potential victims.
On that count, he faces up to five years in prison.
The trial had drawn widespread attention in part because it involved a police officer's bizarre and disturbing behavior, but also because it highlighted some of the darkest corners of the Internet, where fetishists hide behind Web identities like Girlmeat Hunter, which Mr.
Valle used, and engage in role-playing fantasy about cannibalism and sexual torture.
Officer Valle, who worked in the 26th Precinct in Manhattan, had planned his crimes with three co-conspirators through one such Web site, prosecutors said.
They said he also took steps beyond the computer, like conducting surveillance of potential victims and researching them in a law enforcement database.
"The evidence proves beyond a reasonable doubt that Officer Valle's plans were real, that he was serious, that he was not just entertaining himself," a prosecutor, Hadassa Waxman, told the jury on Thursday.
"He would have carried out a plan if he thought he could get away with it," she added.
Mr.
Valle's lawyers told the jury that their client had merely been involved in role-play and never intended to harm anyone.
"It was all fantasy — sick, twisted, ugly fantasies, traded on the computer," Julia L.
Gatto, a federal public defender, said in her summation on Thursday.
"That's what this prosecution rests on, the ugliness of Gil's thoughts."
"We don't convict human beings because of ugly thoughts," she added.
But Ms.
Waxman, the prosecutor, told jurors that Mr.
Valle had "left the world of fantasy."
"He entered the world of reality," she said, "and, thankfully, he was stopped before he could act."
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