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Hans Reiser Guilty of First Degree Murder
Anonymous Meoward writes "Today Hans Reiser was found guilty of first degree murder in Oakland, California. Quoting Wired: 'In a murder case with no body, no crime scene, no reliable eyewitness and virtually no physical evidence, the prosecution began the trial last November with a daunting task ahead... The turning point in the trial came when Reiser took the stand in his own defense March 3.' Whether he really did it or not, Hans basically just didn't know when to shut up."
SHUT THE FUCK UP. Honestly, that is the advice you need. SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP. Don't talk. Don't answer questions. If you must talk, please state the following: 1) "Am I under arrest?" If YES, then say, "I want a lawyer." If NO, get up and leave. If you co-operate and help them out and do them a favor, whatever--they will talk you into taking the blame. They'll have you convinced you did it even if you didn't. PLEASE, SHUT UP.
blarg.
I'm sorry, but that's ridiculous. Last I knew you had to prove that he planned to kill someone with a first degree murder charge. If you can't prove she's dead, and nobody saw her die, and there's no evidence that she's anywhere other than where he says, you can't convict a person of first degree murder.
Can you imagine what would happen if this guy was black?
In my truck you'll find a copy of the Satanic Bible, 1984, and Catcher in the Rye (Harry Potter too, but that's because I'm reading it to my son). Not only that but there's a fairly large spot of my friend's blood that I can't get out from when he stepped on a nail and it went through his shoe, and the passenger lock has fallen off (almost as if someone was trying to hastily escape from my truck). I keep a sleeping bag and blanket in my truck - it's Iowa, what're you gonna do in a blizzard? I'm a loner with a quirky sense of humor.
I think we've just proved that I can be convicted of first degree murder if my friend turns up missing.
For an interesting review of historical views on 'N' (and Blackstone's criteria in general), see http://www.law.ucla.edu/volokh/guilty.htm.
Not if you know when to shut up.
I make websites and stuff. Buy one.
No evidence? No body? No murder weapon? Who cares! The prosecutor used Power Point in his closing.. The defendant is "weird".
Did you bother to RTFA? There was plenty of evidence. A body is not required to arrest and convict somebody of murder. Otherwise all anybody would have to do would be to cremate the body and poof! No crime!
The article gives just a couple of examples, but they're obviously examples of many. The guy spent 11 full days on the stand. The one pretty incriminating example of evidence cited in the article is the fact that he removed the passenger seat of his car just after his wife's disappearance, then hosed down the interior and left an inch of standing water on the floor boards. Now, you tell me why any average person has reason to do that. I can tell you that in 20 years of car ownership and six different cars, I have never once taken the passenger seat out of my car, thrown it away and then hosed down the interior, and I don't know anyone else who has either. His explanation was that he liked to sleep in the car and wanted the extra room. Does this sound plausible to you?
So, let's just look at this *one* piece of evidence. Guy's wife disappears. He then immediately removes the seat from his car, which is never seen again, and he hoses down the interior of the car. That doesn't paint a picture for you? Now, let's say you ask the guy why he did that and he gives you a laughably ridiculous explanation. And let's say this goes on for 11 days as the prosecution asks him to explain every other piece of evidence, and his explanations are no less ridiculous in each case.
The standard for guilt or innocence is proof beyond a reasonable doubt. That doesn't mean *any* doubt, and that's the mistake people often make. It's *reasonable* doubt. Is it reasonable to assume he was telling the truth about that car seat? Would any reasonable person do what he did with that car seat? And if all his other explanations about the evidence presented were similar, is it reasonable to assume he was telling the truth about anything?
Yes, exactly, the problem was that Reiser eliminated doubt. All that was left was the simple question: Was his testimony credible? Well, based solely on the few snippets in the article, it doesn't sound credible at all. Sitting through 11 days of that, and I can see being completely convinced he was lying his ass off. And that's being me, knowing full well how weird, paranoid, and asocial geeks can be.
The thing is, that while there was only circumstantial evidence, there was rather a lot of it. That amount of evidence is used to convict people plenty often. You don't have to have a body, a gun with fingerprints on it, and ballistics that match the bullet in the body. "Circumstantial" blood stains require either a lot of good explaining, or a lot of shutting up and leaving room for the "reasonable doubt" that your lawyer will certainly argue for. When you try to explain it away, and your explanations sound hollow, then that only leaves the interpretation that you are lying because the circumstantial evidence is real evidence.
There's a good lesson here: Listen to your lawyer. If your lawyer says it would be a bad idea for you to testify, it's probably because they know what they are talking about. It's very much a geek thing to want to address every point made by your opponent directly, to leave nothing left unaccounted for. Except that when your rebuttals are weak, you can actually have the opposite effect. Let your lawyer figure out when that is appropriate.
The enemies of Democracy are
Yeah that'd do it, genius.
by Mike Buddha -- Someday the mountain might get him, but the law never will.
The problem is, you can't have your cake and eat it too. Once you take the stand in your own defense, the prosecution has a right to cross examine you. You can't just be examined by your defense attorney in a positive light and not give the prosecution the chance to dim that light. You can't start claiming the fifth once you are up there and said your side.
In this case, his attorney was right in advising Hans not to take the stand. Better to have people think you are an idiot than to open your mouth and remove all doubt!
This is a sig. This is only a sig. Had this been an actual sig you would have been informed where to tune for more sigs.
You've likely never slept in a car, then. I have, plenty of times. And I'd much rather sleep in the passenger seat than remove it and sleep on a hard bumpy floorboard with rails and bolts sticking out of it. Especially if I were tall, because if I slept on the floor, the back seat would get in the way, whereas the front seat back extends over the back seat and thus gives you more room.
So no, that claim is not credible at all. Especially when combined with a refusal to tell where you disposed of the seat, and hosing down the floor mats.
(Of course, the best car to sleep (or fsck) in were the old Ramblers, where you folded down the front couch, and it lined up with the rear seat to become a double bed.)
That's because you aren't on the jury and didn't actually sit through the full trial.
Neither did I, which is why I won't say whether or not he's guilty.. I (and you) don't have all the facts.
Not quite -- At the most basic level, Habeas Corpus is the principle that the government must bring the accused to a public court and publicly let him know what the charges are. This is the whole problem with Guantanamo -- we never get to see the defendant (was he tortured? is he alive?) and nobody gets to hear the charges, not even the accused. Habeas was developed in England before the US even became a nation to prevent Government abuse. Looks like we're regressing.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
People are lazy. People are only patriotic when it comes to buying a $1 sticker and sticking it to their car. People think of themselves, only, even when they appear to be thinking of someone else, usually it is because it benefits themselves in some way. People are animals in fancy cloths, 3 foodless days away from running around in packs tearing apart anything that looks edible.
Oh, and water is wet.
Look at the issues in the Hans Reiser case: Marriage. Money. Economic disparity between the accused and the alleged victim. Breakdown of an abusive relationship. Comfortable, middle-class, single male may just not have a lot of empathy for any of these situations.
Or, to put it another way: Who would you want sitting on your jury? Hans Reiser?
Breakfast served all day!
For a lot of reasons, people will confess to crimes they didn't commit. There are mountains of literature on it so you can do research as to theories why and conditions that cause it and such. Suffice to say it happens. So the courts don't just take any random confession at face value. You'll notice that Sturgeon isn't in prison. If you confess to 8 murders, and the court believes you, you'd better believe you are going to be behind bars. That he isn't says that they don't find his confessions to be at all credible.
Now this is important, because otherwise, it would create a "Get out of murder free" situation more or less. As an example:
Suppose you and I conspire together. You are going to murder someone, but I agree that if you get caught I'll confess to it at your trial. This would of course create reasonable doubt for you. However, I'll make sure that there is plenty of evidence showing I didn't do it (for example be on camera somewhere at the time of the murder) so when they bring me to trial, I get off. Bingo, you got away with murder.
This isn't even to mention the problem of people with mental problems who confess to things they didn't do for any number of reasons.
A good judge isn't going to allow evidence, on either side, that is likely false. They also aren't going to allow in evidence that is highly prejudicial if it isn't relevant to the case, even if it is true. For example on the prosecution side prior bad acts are limited. They can be admitted to evidence if they relate to the case, for example if someone is accused of robbery and he has 5 robbery convictions, well that's relevant because it establishes a pattern of behaviour. However if you were on trial for tax evasion, they couldn't get in a domestic violence conviction, since all that would do is prejudice the jury and it isn't relevant.
Having sat for jury duty a few times, and being rejected every time, I can tell you that the -last- thing a lawyer wants on a jury is somebody with critical thinking skills.
I was taught to respect my elders. The trouble is, it's getting harder and harder to find some.
Having confessed to eight murders doesn't automatically make one a mass murderer, just like having denied murdering someone doesn't automatically make one innocent of murder.
FWIW, the police didn't take Mr. Sturgeon's confessions seriously enough to press charges. That should tell you something.
And zealot mentality isn't necessary logical. To them, a major OSS figure being convicted of murder is a blow to OSS. Thus it is a bad thing and they don't want to believe it's real.
I mean look at the crap with the OLPC. When it was all OSS, all the time, the zealots had nothing but praise. They talked about how great it was not because of the software, but because of how it would help children and bridge the technology gap and such. Now they are hating on it, even though it still promises the same fundamental world-changing things, it isn't within their dogma anymore so they hate it.
It's the same sort of thing as religious zealotry. You can be a zealot about ideals other than a religion, but it leads to the same kind of attitude and though process. When something doesn't fit in your beliefs, you deny it and explain it away.
- - went to college, and
- - have multiple Master's degrees, and
- - am an engineer, and
- - own and run my own successful business
I can only conclude that both sides prefer to exclude jurors who can think, who evaluate the evidence presented and are not swayed by emotional arguments beyond the evidence itself. Both sides (prosecution and defense) seem to want jurors who can be hoodwinked into believing the out-of-band implications of a theatrical presentation.In theory, practice and theory are the same. In practice, they rarely are.
I am an attorney. I try jury cases, civil litigation these days, but I worked for a short stint as a prosecutor. I have selected many jurors.
I can tell you first off that most attorneys do NOT want engineers on their juries. The reason is not at all that we don't want critical thinkers. Rather, it's because most engineers are a lot more like Hans Reiser than they would like to admit. Engineers have a tendency to glorify logic to the point that they ignore common sense. The law, and particularly criminal law, is not a science. No one can conclusively proove that a person committed a crime in the same way that a mathematician can prove his theorums. Engineers also tend to be arrogant, and tend to believe that they know more than everyone else about everything. I ought to know, my brother is one. And so the fear is that engineers will have a marked tendency to consider the evidence in an unfair way, to ignore what the lawyers say about the evidence, and to bully everyone else in the jury room into a point of view that does not give due credit to all of the circumstances and the evidence.
Take Reiser's case. The man is so obviously guilty it reeks. An Engineer might say, well they haven't even proved that she's dead. But somehow we are supposed to believe that she left a car full of groveries on the side of the road, failed to show up to her best friend's house, and left her kids in the hands of a man that she hates so that she could fly away to Russia? That's ridiculous. A lawyer would say that you don't have to prove something as absolutely true, but only beyond a *reasonable* doubt. It isn't reasonable to believe that this woman left her car, her groceries, her friends, and her kids to fly off to Russia, where nobody has heard from her since.
Think about it, if the prosecution had to have a body every time they tried someone for murder, than any murderer who found a good enough hiding spot for the body would get off. That may be scientifically sound, but it's not justice.
Now take the fact that they found Nina's blood in Reiser's house, and on his sleeping bag. He removed his car seat from his car, and flooded the compartment to try to wash it, and left an inch of water in there. Then he claims he was sleeping in his car. Is there any other reasonable explanation than that this car was used to transport a body? Sure, you can come up with other explanations, but none of them are *reasonable* The books on murder, the suspicious behavior, etc., are just icing on the cake.
But the reality is that a good attorney might have had a chance to get Reiser off, despite his glaring guilt. "Beyond a reasonable doubt" is a damn high burden to meet, and often times a good lawyer can inject enough uncertainty into a case to keep the jury from reaching that threshhold. But when Reiser took the stand, he basically removed all chance of that happening. He apparently gave some completely ridiculous explanations to some very important questions, like why in gods name would anyone use a hose to wash out their car and then leave an inch of standing water in there, when that is where they sleep. So basically, Reiser made what could have been reasonable doubts sound completely unreasonable. And that is why he was convicted, and not because of his arrogance or disdain towards humanity (although I'm sure that didn't help him either).