Westerfield - Minority Report

Is it still a crime if the offense in question hasn't been committed yet or is the presence of intent in and of itself good enough? In Steven Spielberg's movie adaptation of the short story Minority Report, the key word in this question is "yet". Anderton explains the process of precrime by rolling a ball across a table that Witwer catches before it can drop off, asserting that the ball would have still fallen to the ground if Witwer hadn't caught it. But this argument assumes that our universe is deterministic, which is why things start to fall apart when Anderton himself is accused of precrime.
The credibility of the system is only further clouted when we learn of the existence of minority reports, cases in which one of the precogs disagrees with the predictions of the others. In the original Philip K. Dick short story, Anderton winds up with all three predictions being minority reports, even though there is a consensus between two that he will kill Leopold Kaplan. In trying to predict the future the prediction itself becomes an unaccounted variable that ultimately self-invalidates. The first precog prediction doesn't take into account its own discovery by Anderton and thus incorrectly states that he will kill Kaplan. The seconds accounts for the first and rules that he will not but fails, like the first to account for itself. Likewise the third also accounts for the previous two but is unable to be self-aware in its calculation and thus is no more trustworthy.
Spielberg's adaptation, whilst addressing some of the paradoxes of prediction, primarily focuses on the issue of free will. At one point in the film Anderton goes to the prisoner holding area and we observe possibly hundreds of people locked in suspended animation who haven't actually committed any crime because they were "prevented". The idea of thought crime is a scary one, owing itself to George Orwell's 1984 and McCarthy's Red Scare. But in those cases it originates out of fear and paranoia rather than a sense of justice. At some level the idea of thought-crime seems to deny people free will because the no longer have the ability to choose an action. If a person doesn't actually do anything can he still be held responsible?
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