When I was but a wee one I heard warnings about the “Thought Police.”  If you are thinking bad thoughts you can get in trouble by these omnipotent enforcers, especially if they are bad thoughts about other people.  I am still short, but I would like to think that I am no longer quite as naive as I was when I feared being arrested for hoping Suzie would stub her toe, but it seems I can still get in trouble by the “Thought Police” for thinking about or planning to do something that would tick the St. Louis Metropolitan Police off. 

Like, say I had wanted to protest the World Agricultural Forum, as a group in St. Louis had planned to do in 2003.  The group was arrested for a myriad of reasons, since there are no laws prohibiting public demonstration. The arrests were a preemptive strike in the days before the forum was scheduled to start.  The group that was aressted has filed to take St. Louis Police Department to court over civil liberties violations this month.  They will be represented by an ACLU lawyer and are seeking minimal punitive damages.  I concede that the arrests were made to stop protests that could have potentially turned violent, but the right to demonstrate peaceably is a basic American right and these arrests were made to squelch a protest.  If they had proof that the group posed was an imminent danger to the public, and had planned violent activities, they should have obtained warrants – which they did not do.

This all seems like a pretty straightforward case of a civil rights violation, but consider a case that might be on the docket for the Supreme Court.  The Court is expected to rule on a child pornography case that would speak to intent to distribute.  In question is the language in a ruling on the subject that allows for people who discuss distribution to be charged.  In a common law society this can have a major impact on the way judges rules in future cases related to intention and crimes of thought.  Though an extreme case in point, there is only a small difference between the two.  The Supreme Court may very well rule that the penalties reach to far, but that also opens up the doors for people to freely discuss that distribution of such damaging materials. 

Just some food for thought, since things go both ways.  When you open the doors for something good you sometimes let in the bad too.