Slashdot Mirror
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."
No evidence? No body? No murder weapon? Who cares! The prosecutor used Power Point in his closing.. The defendant is "weird".
Oh well, maybe Hans will confess and reveal where he stashed the body now.
[/rimshot]
How we know is more important than what we know.
Can he work on free software from jail? He won't commercially gain from the crime and he can contribute for the good of society as a whole (in fact, provide a benefit that the world can use).
The prosecutor was also able to exclude the testimony of a guy called Sturgeon, who admitted to killing at least eight people and was having an affair with Hans Reiser's wife. If his testimony were allowed, it'd be the battle of the two weirdos and Hans, being the guy in a murder case who hasn't admitted to murdering, probably would have came out on top.
A NYC lawyer blogs. http://www.chuangblog.com/
He didn't represent himself. He took the stand in his own defense.
Personally I am blown away by the incompetence of the defense attorney. Clearly he must have understood Reiser (guilty or not) would not help his case by testifying. He should never have been put on the stand.
]{
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.
My personal opinion is that Hans killed Nina in a fit of rage, then scrambled to cover up the evidence. I did not see any evidence whatsoever of premeditation. So I can not at all understand how this jury reached a verdict of First degree murder.
It's written in his journal!
RTFA, Reiser's defense attorney didn't want to put him on the stand, but Reiser insisted.
>Too bad ReiserFS will probably die
I'm guessing it will disappear in the middle of the night, never to be heard from again. Police will arrest the xfs maintainer on chargest, the evidence being that neighbors saw him carry out what could have been a backup tape wrapped in a roll of carpet in the middle of the night.
I live in North Oakland and knew Hans Reiser from the Berkeley OCF.
I met Nina Reiser at a pre-school picnic.
Nina seemed like a typical harried mom - devoted to her kids and quite kind (she got a cup of juice for my daughter).
Hans, on the other hand, went out of his way to be mean, petty, arrogant, and small minded. He acted as if he owned the Open Computer Facility, and that everyone should kow-tow to him. Once he booted an undergrad off the system because she had posted a Usenet message that he disagreed with.
I attended the trial for several days. I was impressed with how carefully the jurors followed the witnesses, even though the testimony was boring.
Hans shot himself in the foot by testifying. Maybe he shot both feet. He used the passive voice when describing critical events, as if he were an outside observer. He varied from extremely explicit (remembering license plates) to utterly vague (not remembering where he slept).
Even though I wanted him to get out of this squeeze, I quite agree with the jurors on this one: there may not be a body, but Hans committed murder.
In all likelihood, Reiser's lawyer did not want to put Reiser on the stand. However, it is generally accepted "[i]n a criminal case, [a] lawyer shall abide by the client's decision, after consultation with the lawyer...whether the client will testify." It is assumed that the right of a client to testify in criminal cases is a constitutional right. See Nix v. Whiteside, 475 U.S. 157, para. 16. Even if the client's testimony can only hurt the defense, the lawyer must allow the client to testify if the client so insists. To do otherwise would be unethical and impair the client's rights.
For an interesting review of historical views on 'N' (and Blackstone's criteria in general), see http://www.law.ucla.edu/volokh/guilty.htm.
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
Mod parent up. I recently was called for jury duty and was directly asked the question "Do you agree with the statement that is it better to have five guilty men go free then put one innocent man in jail?" by the defense attorney. I think my response was something like "of course," and I remember being shocked that a significant number of potential jurors did not agree. Afterwards, though, I realized that the question really breaks down to "what's an acceptable false positive rate?" 1 in 10? 1 in 100? It made me realize the situation is not as clear cut as I originally thought. Sure, I can barely imagine the horror of being an innocent man in prison, but the fact is that you do need to accept some error rate to live in a lawful society.
Ba dum dum. Thank you. I'm here all week. Have the lobster!
There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom
...he created one killer file system!
Reiser fsck YOU!
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
This is a FAT32 partition, it comes from microsoft.
It has a 4GB limit, in the age of 5GB DVDs why would you ship a product with a 4GB limit?
It just doesn't make any sense!
If this is FAT32 partition, the jury must acquit!!
IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
Habeas refers to the _defendant's_ body. You have bring the person to court, demonstrate that he hasn't been killed or tortured, and publicly announce the charges. Habeas corpus does not refer to victim's bodies. For a nice history of Habeas, see Habeas Schmabeas.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
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
You are right. Believe it or not, the "body" in question is that of the accused.
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 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.
I hate to tell you, but that is what you end up if you ship a mail order blad' sorry bride for yourself.
So beware of those Anastasia International banner ads on Slashdot. Be afraid, be very afraid.
Disclaimer - I am half of the same nationality myself and I have observed how my mom has dealt with my dad (another geek) for 25+ years. No thanks. None of that in my house. Not now, not ever.
Sad, really sad, and IMO totally selfinflicted.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
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.
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).