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Hans Reiser and the "Geek Defense" Strategy

Posted by kdawson on from the thinks-too-much dept.

lseltzer alerts us to a story in the Washington Post on the defense strategy in the Hans Reiser murder trial. "In the courtroom where Hans Reiser is on trial for murder, [the evidence] might appear to indicate guilty knowledge. But his attorneys cast it as evidence of an innocence peculiar to Hans, a computer programmer so immersed in the folds of his own intellect that he had no idea how complicit he was making himself appear. 'Being too intelligent can be a sort of curse,' defense counsel William Du Bois said. 'All this weird conduct can be explained by him, but he's the only one who can do it. People who are commonly known as computer geeks are so into the field.'"

18 of 738 comments (clear)

  1. All geeks are the same by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Most of us have soaked our floorboards after we removed the passenger seat.

    1. Re:All geeks are the same by Asztal_ · · Score: 5, Funny

      Who the hell commits a crime with pair of books on crime in their vehicle, and then leave it all there for someone to find. Programmers know too much about allocation and management of objects to not destroy them when its detrimental they no longer exist. Maybe he was foiled by non-deterministic Garbage Collection.
    2. Re:All geeks are the same by jbengt · · Score: 5, Informative

      According to reports I've read, he bought those books after he was treated as a suspect by the cops, not before the crime.

    3. Re:All geeks are the same by dubl-u · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Believe it or not, I have been in a situation where I had a removed front passenger seat and a soaked footwell. [...] I removed the seat so I could get my head in there to look closely. But then I ran out of time, so I just left it like that till next weekend. That's surely plausible. But the notion that Reiser then threw out the seat? No way. Every geek I know has a giant collection of old parts that they will use "someday". A real geek would have kept the seat. Even if there was something wrong with it, there were plenty of good parts on that sucker.

      Christ, I've still got a 100 MB SCSI hard drive in my parts bin that I haven't thrown away yet. Yeah, megabytes, that's right.
    4. Re:All geeks are the same by spintriae · · Score: 5, Funny

      Believe it or not, I have been in a situation where I had a removed front passenger seat and a soaked footwell.

      Oh, I believe you. I too have had to remove my passenger seat and hose down the floor board. Mainly because they were soaked in my ex-wife's blood...

      Since then I always keep tampons in the glove compartment.

    5. Re:All geeks are the same by Lijemo · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Not trusting a jury can come back and bite you - look at what happened with Jamie Thomas and the $222,000 copyright infringement award. The jurors were pissed that she lied to them [switched.com], and made it known both inside and outside the courtroom [wired.com]. "She's a liar. We wanted to send a message. I don't know what the fuck she was thinking." Wow, reading stuff like this makes me really glad I don't live in a country that has something as stupid trial by jury. I wouldn't want my fate to be decided by a bunch of random idiots. Isn't the jury supposed to decide if the accused is guilty of the deed they are accused of ? Instead of "sending her a message" because she hurt their feelings ? That statement by a member of the jury alone should have been enough to nullify the judgement.

      There are two types of jury trials in the US-- criminal and civil. In a civil trial (where the punishment, if there is one, is in the form of a fine) the jury determines what the penelty is.

      In a criminal trial (such as the one in TFA, which can result in imprisonment), all the jury decides is whether the prosecution has proven their case that the defendent is guilty. The judge then decides the penalties, based on guidelines, precedents, and his/her own judgement

      The standard of proof required is also different. In a civil case (such as the one you quote), if a jury member is 60% sure the defendant is guilty, they are suppposed to find them "guilty". In a criminal case, the standard of proof is much higher, so the same 60% certainty of guilt should result in "not guilty", because their prosecution has not sufficiently proved their case.

      The result is that the civil trial system is much more capricious than the criminal trial. Thus you should not hold up an example of a civil trial to complain about our criminal trial system. (There may still be things to complain about, but don't hold up an apple and complain about oranges.)

  2. Gem of a quote by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    His signal adult achievement was ReiserFS, a file system he named for himself, unusual in the programming world. The system organizes data on Linux, the "open source" operating system. In the same breath, they say naming something after ones own name is unusual, and refer to the OS written by a guy named Linus. Hows that for irony.
    1. Re:Gem of a quote by mccalli · · Score: 5, Insightful

      In the same breath, they say naming something after ones own name is unusual, and refer to the OS written by a guy named Linus. Hows that for irony.

      Linus named it FreakOS I believe. It was someone else who convinced him to rename it to Linux.

      Cheers,
      Ian

  3. /. defense by tverbeek · · Score: 5, Funny

    I'm too anti-social to be a threat to society.

    --
    http://alternatives.rzero.com/
  4. Re:Desperate Twinkies by Omnifarious · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It's not the Twinkie Defense. Hans is claiming he didn't murder her, not that some bizarre psychological condition associated with being a geek should mitigate his action in some way. The psychological aspect is used only to explain why he acted so strangely and why those strange actions are not indicative of guilt. Basically, it didn't even occur to him that those actions might be seen as acting guilty.

    From what I can tell, the prosecution has absolutely not proven Hans' guilt beyond the shadow of a doubt. They have not met the standard of proof required for a criminal conviction. All they have is some fairly flimsy circumstantial evidence.

    But that's a separate question from whether or not I think he's guilty. And given the available evidence I can't decide either way. This case just is too bizarre. I can actually believe that Nina has managed to escape back to Russia and finagled the courts through the rest of her family into letting her children go back too. But I can also believe that Hans murdered her. Both scenarios fit the available evidence.

    --
    Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
  5. What serious evidence is there against him? by MikeRT · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Sean Sturgeon confessed to killing eight people. If I were the homicide detective, you damn well better believe I'd be urging the prosecutor to dismiss the charges without prejudice so that the scope of the investigation could be brought to bear on HIM, now. The guy is into "death yoga," serious BDSM and confessed to killing eight people. The guy is a total loon based on what has come out, and he'd probably score very dangerously high on a sociopath scale. Hans might be the killer, but if I were a cop, I'd have spat my coffee out all over the report in shock when I read that Nina had gotten herself involved with a guy who sounds like a real nutjob who probably killed her.

    Unless they found Nina's blood all over Reiser's car, they don't have much to go on. Even then, it's not unrealistic to think that Sturgeon might have tried to frame Reiser.

    The details of this case are very sordid. I wouldn't put it past the prosecutors to be ignoring sturgeon's high probability of guilt out of pride because they "have their man." This is one of the reasons why I unabashedly support making it impossible to give a life sentence or execution without a minimum of two credible witnesses, and serious penalties (that can include execution in murder cases) for those who commit perjury.

    1. Re:What serious evidence is there against him? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      The guy is into "death yoga," serious BDSM and confessed to killing eight people. The guy is a total loon based on what has come out, and he'd probably score very dangerously high on a sociopath scale.


      'Serious BDSM' is what I do sometimes, but it has nothing to do with being a sociopath!

      If BDSM is not your piece of cake, fine, but do not put it at the same level as killing people because you simply do not understand it.

    2. Re:What serious evidence is there against him? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      'Serious BDSM' is what I do sometimes...

      If BDSM is not your piece of cake, fine, but do not put it at the same level as killing people because you simply do not understand it.

      *sighs*

      You OS X people are all alike. And it's "BSD", not "BDSM."

  6. Re:My Suspicion by MightyMartian · · Score: 5, Funny

    Nina *may* have gone to Russia. Didn't her family supposedly have some "connections"?


    Well, at least some symbolic links.
    --
    The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
  7. Re:The Geek Defense Argument by Renderer+of+Evil · · Score: 5, Funny

    OK, so you've established that Reiser is not a geek... So what is he?
    Hans Reiser is a general-purpose, journaled collection of cells that relies on DNA metadata to reduce internal fragmentation.
  8. beyond the shadow of a doubt by hxnwix · · Score: 5, Funny

    I and many of my geek friends would have a hard time proving our innocence if such accusations were leveled against us.

    Imagine if they looked in our basements... I can hear the cross examiner already: "sir, can you explain to us what made you so angry that you shot this Compaq server 382 times with a .22 rifle? Do you usually shoot things that annoy you? You said that computers are important to you - so important that you like to shoot them repeatedly. Was your wife important to you? Did she sometimes annoy you? No further questions."

    Fortunately, we are innocent until proven guilty...

  9. Re:Desperate Twinkies by BiggerIsBetter · · Score: 5, Insightful

    You forgot to mention the other guy, Sean Sturgeon, who was also close to the victim. The dude who has confessed to killing 8 (yes, eight) people, and was dating Nina (Hans' wife). IMHO, it's more likely that Hans was reading up on how to kill Sean (or even how to avoid being killed by Sean) than how to kill Nina.

    --
    Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
  10. Re:Desperate Twinkies by Ozan · · Score: 5, Funny
    No, I would think more of an inverted Chewbacca defense:

    William Du Bois

    Ladies and gentlemen of this supposed jury, the district attorney would certainly want you to believe that my client killed his wife. And they make a good case. Hell, even I almost think it was him! But, ladies and gentlemen of this supposed jury, I have one final thing I want you to consider. Ladies and gentlemen, this is Alan Turing. Turing was a Mathematician from England. He came up with what is now called a Turing Machine. Now think about it: that does make perfect sense! Paul Hora

    Damn it! He's using the Turing Defense! William Du Bois

    Now why would Alan Turing, a Mathematician from England would invent something like a Turing Machine? Because it helps to show that some problems are never solvable by computing. Does that make any sense? Yes it does.
    Imagine a Turing Machine and a set of instructions. Can anybody tell, if the machine, running those instructions will ever stop? And more important: can we program a Turing Machine, so that it decides whether a set of instructions would cause a Turing Machine to halt eventually? But more important, you have to ask yourself: What does this have to do with this case? Everything. Ladies and gentlemen, this case completedly depends on it! It does make a lot of sense! Look at me. I'm a lawyer defending a software engineer, and I'm talkin' about Alan Turing!
    Now how can it be, that this halting problem is undecideable? Because, if we hypotheticaly have a Turing Machine that solves the halting problem, we could use it to construct another Turing Machine that does not halt when it should, and thus, when given to itself to test for halting, would contradict its own behavior!
    Does that make sense? Ladies and gentlemen, I am making perfect sense! And so you have to remember, when you're in that jury room deliberatin' and conjugatin' the verdict, do you know wheter you will ever stop deliberatin'? No! Ladies and gentlemen of this supposed jury, you will never know! If the jury doesn't halt, you must acquit! The defense rests!