These judges wouldn’t bite — because they’re afraid he will!
A Manhattan appeals court refused to release accused NYPD “cannibal cop” Gilberto Valle on bail today after a prosecutor said he described how his “mouth was watering” as he sized up a woman he planned to make his “next meal.”
The three-judge panel at the U.S. Second Circuit Court of Appeals didn’t even blink before unanimously rejecting Valle’s bid to reverse the previous rulings of three separate, lower-court judges.
The means Valle, 28, will remain locked up in solitary confinement pending his trial, which was delayed yesterday until March 25 at the request of the defense.
During about 15 minutes of oral arguments, Manhattan federal prosecutor Hadassa Waxman described the six-year NYPD veteran as a danger to the community, saying he schemed to kidnap, cook and eat women during Internet chats she called “depraved, disgusting, troubling, gruesome.”
Waxman also revealed additional details in the case, saying Valle told a co-conspirator that he planned to make a female friend in Maryland his “next meal,” and that his “mouth was watering the whole time” when he visited her in July.
Public defender Edward Zas contended that “the entire prosecution is misguided,” noting that 40,000 people routinely take part in “the most depraved, heinous chats” at the sexual-fetish Web site where he insisted Valle merely engaged in “role-play.”
”He’s done nothing but imagine bad things and put them, foolishly, on the Internet in a really bad way,” Zas said.
But Judge Chester Straub sharply questioned Zas’s claims that it was all fantasy, noting prosecution allegations that Valle kept files on more than 80 women and conducted “surveillance” of one of his intended victims outside her Manhattan apartment.
A lawyer representing that woman — identified only as “Victim-2” — attended the arguments and said she and her client were “very pleased” by the ruling.
“It was the outcome we anticipated,” lawyer Michelle Mechanic added.
Also yesterday, Valle’s lawyers filed court papers seeking to block prosecutors from introducing “highly inflammatory” evidence from his chats with an alleged co-conspirator identified only as “Moody Blues,” who “appears to recount times in his past when he has cannibalized children.”
“Mr. Valle never engages in conversation on this subject with Moody Blues other than to usher the conversation away from the matter and into sexual fantasies about which Mr. Valle finds arousing — all of which have to do with adults,” public defenders Julia Gatto and Christopher Flood wrote.
“Accordingly, while some portions of Mr. Valle’s chats with Moody Blues are admissible…the portions regarding Moody Blues’ hyperbolic and twisted (recounting) of prior instances of cannibalization are either irrelevant, exceedingly prejudicial, or both.”
bruce.golding@nypost.com