Slashdot Mirror
Hans Reiser To Reveal Location of Wife's Body
dlgeek writes "The story of Hans Reiser is well known to all Slashdotters by now. Some still placed doubts about the conviction, stating that he might be innocent. It now seems that all doubt has been quelled, since Alameda County District Attorney Thomas Orloff has revealed that Hans Reiser will disclose the location of Nina's body for a reduced sentence.
The deal is not yet finalized, though. 'There's been some overtures,' Orloff said, 'But everything is in its preliminary stage.' The deal would reduce his conviction from first degree to second degree murder. In addition, an anonymous source close to the situation said that 'the only real leverage he has is if he can provide a body. He really doesn't have any options left. Even if he won a retrial somehow, he'd likely be convicted.'"
BS. This doesn't mean he did it. It means he is the World's Greatest Detective. He's Batman!
Weeks ago, there wasn't even a known body!
Wow I feel like a moron for have ever attempted to defend Hans online at all. Like he was friends, and his wife was seeing, a guy that murdered several people.
Now he's just going to fess up to the murder.
I guess this marks the end of ReiserFS. I'm sure no one in the Linux community wants to be associated to that piece of work.
Whereas now theres an unknown body - and they don't know where it is yet either.
Caesar si viveret, ad remum dareris.
You mean I can't believe everything I read on Slashdot? What's next, I can't believe everything I read on the rest of the Internet, too?
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
I hope this thread has minimal snarky sarcastic comments, this is just sad all around.
I totally didn't see this one coming. ... even if convicted I bet the parole board would take into consideration the lack of a body, and hard evidence for that matter, just a few years into his sentence.
Always thought the guy was inocent.
Plus this is a really dumb move
Really dumb move especially for a sociopath.
did the article just speculate?
No where in the article does it say that he has agreed to it, they are speculating that there might be a reduced sentence if Hans discloses where the body is. Also, he is most likely going to be someone's "slave" once he is in prison, so if he gets 15 or 25 years it is most likely going to be in protected custody (= voluntary solitary confinement) and 15 years alone is going to mess him even up let alone 25 years, either way he is done for.
Glad I'm not in the US, getting life in prison for something that has way too many loose ends, just isn't right.
(On a side note, whats with those extremely long terms in prison? Anyone going in for 25 years will never be able to get back into society - I thought the point of prison was to punish and correct the guilty and get them back into working order. There was a couple who got life in prison for mistreating their child to the point of death (raised her as a vegan) - a British couple got 3 years community service for the same thing)
Great comic strip who didnt believe him HERE.
Got any lime?
I'm using the file system of a murderer.
Anyone else consider the Anastasia advert to be in bad taste, given the context of the story?
At the bottom of the
But I thought he was just an innocent dork.
Yeah, but by now, I reckon they'll only find a few bits.
Hans is about to have the world experience more chaos.
"The story of Hans Reiser is well known to all Slashdotters by now."
No.
-- Boycott Shell
Does this mean that some time soon Richard Stallman is going to tell us where the HURD kernel is?
I've got the troll points for arguing that he was guilty from the get-go, and I think that he is. But, in this case, I think before those people who supported him jump off of a mental cliff, let's let the DA actually deliver the body and the proof of Hans's cooperation. The story is believable enough, but, let's let the DA PROVE it first.
This is my sig.
Wow I feel like a moron for have ever attempted to defend Hans online at all.
You shouldn't. To most people, even people who "defended" him, it was more likely than not that he was guilty. But the legal criterion is "beyond a reasonable doubt". I think based on the publicly released evidence, there was still a reasonable doubt.
I still don't feel really comfortable with jurors making decisions based on "looking into people's eyes", as one of the jurors was saying; given how many people believe in astrology, mind reading, new age, and other supernatural stuff, I think there there's a lot of potential for bad decision making there. And there are, indeed, lots of wrongful convictions, so it's not like the system is working perfectly.
Still, it looks like the jurors were right on this one.
Reiser shows off his new methods of undeleting a file and recovering it.
Well, look on the bright side, he will have 20 to life to contribute to his open source initiative project.
Participatory Governance : The only feasible option for a real democracy, where everyone really does have a say.
I betcha he tells them the body is in Russia. In Soviet Russia, dead bodies make you disappear!
You just got troll'd!
Reiser's hubris has sentenced him to what will almost certainly be more minimum 25 (or 15 if he gives up the body) than the 11 year sentenced that he was offered before trial. And of course as a murder, he deserves it.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
hopefully he journaled the location of the body.
In Soviet Russia jokes are formulaic and decidedly non-humorous.
oj simpson's case was skewered in this country by race. that is, more black people tended to think of oj as innocent, and more white people thought of him as guilty
the hans reiser case reveals that techies suffer this same sort of prejudice as black people concerning oj simpson. had this guy not authored a file system,
1. no one would care about this case
2. most would assume his guilt
a lot pof people here think of themselves as intelligent and unbiased. if you assumed reiser's innocence, take a good har dlook in the mirror. tribal-level prejudice flows in your veins
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Note the absence of Hans Reiser's actual statements. For the moment, this may as well be just speculative spin doctoring by Orloff.
There are known known bodies, known unknown bodies and unknown known bodies. But there are no old bold pilots.
Though I am laughing pretty hard.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Poor Hans.
We nerds and geeks have real issues with interpersonal relationships. We spend so much intellectual focus on concrete matters that the ambiguities and unsolvable problems of relationships seem almost alien and impossible with which to cope.
If the stated facts are true, she was having an affair and embezzled money from the company. People have killed and have been killed for less.
What makes it hard is that Hans didn't watch enough CSI or Columbo to get away with it. The two kids losing their mom is tragic. I can't say the woman had it coming, but everyone knows that sort of behavior triggers primal and violent reactions. How enraged would you be?
Its certainly murder, but not 1st degree.
ReiserFS is created by mad men...mad men I tell yah. Next thing you know every computer with ReiserFS is going to becomes alive and go on a murderous rampage. Watch for the hail of CDs and floppy diskettes (yes linux computer still have those :P).
They are even coming out with a secret weapon...the ZIP DISK, tun tun tuuuun.
Remmber guys
"Hold your hat and hang on to your soul
Something's coming to eat the world whole"
WATEVER THEY OFFER YOU....though it sounds really awesome and effient
DONT INSTALL REISERFSSSSSS
The story tag "linuxbusiness" was unnecessary.
Show some professionalism.
That doesn't prove he did it. He's just restoring a copy of her body from the journal.
Maybe the real story here is about a bizarre lab failure during experiments to back up his girlfriend, every geek's dream.
--
make install -not war
It has been quite a while since this block of data was requested. If only there were some way to speed up the recall of stored information.
We call "known unknown"s NULLs here.
from the provided article, I spotted one very interesting comment:
Conclusion: Either he is guilty and gets 15 years or he is innocent and gets 25 years.
For that reason I think the whole idea of "making deals" should be tossed out. Criminals should not be allowed to trade aspects of their crime to reduce their sentence. All that seems to do is encourage them to plan their crime more carefully so they have more "bargaining power" if caught. If he did it, and hadn't hid the body as well, and they found it, he wouldn't be offered this option to reduce his sentence.
Although someone else said that recently no governor has granted parole for anyone convicted of 1st or 2nd degree murder, so it may not matter either way. The "to life" probably will be applied.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
It's in /lost+found.
I am sure that as soon as owners of Volkswagens are made aware of the origin of the company they will immediately abandon their vehicles at the roadside.
Rich And Stupid is not so bad as Working For Rich And Stupid.
he hanged her on a tree to restore the trees balance.
It amazes me how many people assert someone's innocence, based on their (real or imaginary) self-identification with the victim AND ALMOST NO OTHER FACTUAL KNOWLEDGE. "He's a linux guy, he can't have done this."
Why? Is it so impossible to conceive that someone who in generally similar to oneself in one or more categories, somehow has a wire crossed and goes nuts? Is it that self-reference? That we fear we could do such a thing, or deny it entirely?
We really are mostly cavemen with a teeny-tiny veneer of intellect and civilization over a superstitions, animalistic core.
-Styopa
That's what a trial gets you. Not proof. Just a huge weight on the side of "probably guilty" and little on the side "probably innocent".
Hans Reiser, Nina and her murderer (which may be Hans too) know what happened, though if Nina still knows, either there IS an afterlife or she wasn't murdered.
I figured it would be in his journal.
that he will reveal the body is in Egvekinot, Russia. (check Google maps for this hospitable "resort" location, lol)
Yes, I am going to say "I told you so". I posted in just about all of the Reiser threads that I was sure he killed his wife. Why? I had a fiancee (we did not marry though) in Ukraine a few years ago and I know American men who married women from Ukraine and Russia. One thing that is just a 100% constant with these women is that they are always devoted to their children. The idea that a Russian woman would simply abandon her children is just ludicrous in the extreme. A Russian mother would NEVER abandon her children. When Reiser claimed she had done this, I knew he killed her. Since 99% or more of you have never had relationships with women in this part of the world, I can only tell you that they simply do NOT under any circumstances abandon their children. Fathers over there do this all the time, but not mothers.
Another issue is that the women over there are vindictive to an extent that Americans (and probably any man not from there) just cannot comprehend. I found it impossible to believe as well that she would return to Russia simply because any woman I've ever met from that part of the world would instead fight her husband in court just to stick it to him as much as possible. The idea that Nina Reiser would abandon her kids and a possible chance to stick it to Hans in the legal system just to live a footloose life in Russia is impossible to believe for anyone who's had any real experience with these women.
They're saying the deal is off if the autopsy can prove its was premeditated. Didn't they find books on how to commit murder and other similar material? Doesn't that alone show premeditation?
> 15 years alone is going to mess him even up..
Like make him so crazy he might kill the mother of his children?
No, a NULL implies zero.
An "unknown unknown" is more like a NaN.
IANAL, but in all the Perry Mason stories I read, the trial always start with proving Corpus Delicti which, as Perry Mason always explains, is not the body of the victim, but a proof that a crime was committed.
In this case, I wonder: wasn't Reiser committed wrongfully? Because if finding the body could turn the conviction from first degree to second degree murder it clearly means that first degree murder hasn't been proved beyond reasonable doubt. At least, "beyond reasonable doubt" doesn't seem like something that could be dispelled by examining a body that has been hidden for several years.
And what if, after examining the body, evidence is found that death could have had a natural cause, or be a suicide? With that reasonable doubt, would the conviction be reversed?
Finally, the juror mentioned in this article that made his decision based on the accused's eyes really scares me. What if I had been tried? Would a crazy schoolteacher send me to prison for life because he didn't like the look in my eyes? There's so much debate on lie detectors in general, experts cannot agree on which subtle body signals will tell if someone is lying or not. If trained police agents, people with vast experience in interrogation practices, using advanced equipment for evaluating stress, cannot tell for sure if someone is lying or not, how come a fifth-grade schoolteacher is able to tell just by a glance at the eyes?...
I'm not saying Reiser is either guilty or not. But that juror's statements make me hope I never stand trial, not under that system, unless there's at least one honest man in the jury to restrain the crazy old schoolteachers.
If you look at this so-called "crime" more as a "hack" than a "murder" it seems a lot cooler.
I mean, here's a guy who didn't like his relationship and simply "scratch an itch". He did what many of us do in more mundane situations.
How about renaming it for the woman he killed? NinaFS, perhaps?
The grass is only greener, if you don't take care of your own lawn.
At least now people will stop trying to defend him - not because they know anything about the case, but just as some sort of metaphoric internet war against haters...
Why are there only 2 conclusions?
If he tells them where the body is, he's probably guilty.
If he doesn't, it may be because he's innocent -or- it would make a serious dent in any appeal he thinks about lodging.
Not being cooperative isn't by default a sign of innocence.
Heck, depending on how (and if) the deed was done, he may simply be incapable of pointing out the body's location ("Now where'd that durn dumptruck get itself to?")
Its almost like the person writing the summary didn't even read the article, but then the article itself has a badly written headline. The D.A. said that Reiser *might* disclose the location of the body for a reduced sentence. So this is nothing more than speculation at this point.
I thought the point of prison was to punish and correct the guilty and get them back into working order
The point of prison here in the USA is pretty much pure punishment only. Nothing else.
It's a shame
If he's guilty, why would they be willing to let him off more easily just because he showed them the body? I don't know what the difference between first and second degree murder is, but "hiding the body" doesn't seem likely to be the main distinction.
Mandatory sentencing is a result of _citizens_ getting up in arms when some convicted rapist on early release molests and murders an eight-year-old girl. It's the result of judges exercising complete stupidity in sentencing violent offenders to ridiculously short periods of incarceration (or none) and then having them commit the same (or worse) crimes again.
Huh? Having actually read all the threads about him, including this one, I see:
1. That about as many people argued that he's guilty, as people argued that he's innocent.
2. People guilt-tripping themselves by association for using his filesystem. (By comparison, I don't think many people burned their copy of Naked Gun just because OJ was in it.)
3. In true nerdy tradition, the argument mostly centered around the semantics of "beyond reasonable doubt." Which some people seemed to believe means "beyond all possible doubt, no matter how unrealistic or far fetched."
I don't think even #3 it had as much to do with wanting to believe Hans was innocent, as with generally defining that term. We're nerds, we need exact definitions, not vague concepts. And it doesn't help that some (but not all) of those involved seem have a certain mind frame that reduces everything to black and white.
You can see that kind of OCPD in lots of discussions about anything else. If program X isn't perfect, then it's complete crap. If company Y isn't saintly, then it's the spawn of Satan. If business decision Z isn't the absolute best in some aspect, far from realizing it's just a debatable compromise among many other possible compromises, it's painted as utter idiocy and as taken by a bunch of drooling morons who can't even tie their own shoes in less than 3 tries. Etc.
And here we saw the same thing: _some_ (but not all) of the people were just arguing whether it's acceptable to convict _anyone_ of first degree murder with less evidence than him doing the murder in the middle of a stadium and showing the the body to everyone. And, mind you, although I probably sound critical of them, the discussion itself does have some philosophical merit. Exactly where do you draw the threshhold of "reasonable doubt"?
Some seem to have a born aversion and distrust of any kind of authority or institution of the State, including the courts of law. Hence, they'll side with anyone who's being picked on by the State.
And some of us just engaged in some idle speculations, basically to the effect of whether facts A, B and C support the conclusion D. Just because it's the kind of intellectual exercise that makes us nerdy in the first place.
So basically if you looked at all this, and all you saw was "tribal-level prejudice", then you're either seriously lacking perception or are just trolling.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
It's been all a plan, made by the ext3 developers. JFS/XFS wives: I'd be staying at home.
There's always FreeBSD.
Locate *.body | grep "nina"
You should RTFA. It doesn't say that he's confessed. Yet, at least. And it doesn't say that's he's offered to lead the DA to the body. Clearly the Wired reporter that wrote the story is used to writing technical articles, not articles about murder and the legal system.
I heard he hides them bits under some kinda tree which makes it easier to finds them. Hell, he even wrote down all the details in his journal.
Ain't that simple enough? Find the journal, find the body.
To this end, another purpose of prison is to protect citizens by removing violent criminals from society.
In any case, in rejecting the conservative koolaid you've apparently taking to smoking the liberal weed. Rehabilitation was not the original purpose of prison in the United States--pointed to by the fact that we _used_ to say that a criminal was released "when they had repaid their debt to society." You'll note that this is not the same as "You're fixed now--go forth and commit murder no more!"
The idea that someone can be rehabilitated is an interesting one, but evaluation of a prisoner's state of mind and character _while in prison_ is pretty much impossible--leaving us with the option of incarceration for the protection of society or freeing violent criminals to prey on new victims. And every some judge lets rapist out who proceds to molest and murder a little girl, the citizens (rightfully) get up in arms and want "mandatory" sentencing.
The system is broken on both ends--a few bad decisions by a few bad judges and people start thinking "I don't want them letting some serial killer loose in my neighborhood" (never mind how statistically unlikely this is) and then: poof! Mandatory Sentencing Law 1243b.
A better solution might be to push for rehabilitation in cases where the crimes were non-violent (or perhaps to use creative sentencing to avoid prison terms for some things) and to find some other alternative for violent criminals.
Unfortunately, the nuances don't lend themselves to sound bites as well as "Convicted rapist molests three-year-old" or "Man unjustly sentenced released after 20 year in jail." And rational discussion is right out these days, in any case.
that was truly awful. I loved it!
Linus would have some trouble murdering his wife: Tove is a six-time Finnish national karate champion.
Ydco co
Can Hans have a computer(s) in prison and continue to work on the file system?
Classy.
Thank you Anastasia international.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
The scary part isn't that he might have been innocent it's that they didn't prove he was guilty or that a crime had been committed. I don't give a crap what happens to Hans (especially if he is as guilty as it appeared all along) but I'm terrified of a system that can convict you with the tiny amount of physical evidence they had. The system is severely broken and this trial proves it even if the greater good won out through a horrible perversion of due process.
The info on http://slashdot.org/~hansreiser his slashdot account?
I love his comment in his Foes section. hansreiser (6963) loves everyone or plays their cards very close to their chest.
... "All work and no play makes Hans a dull boy" ?
Hans hasn't "fessed up" to anything. He is going to be given an offer. That doesn't mean he is guilty (nor does it mean he is innocent). He very well may be guilty, but the evidence just isn't there (not that such a detail would prevent a conviction), and no confession has come yet.
If you want to feel like a moron, do it for jumping to conclusions again.
For example, if he murders ME, I can verify I will stop using the kernel. ;)
There's at least ten Google Maps/GPS jokes in this discussion, but they would be tasteless...though funny, which are usually the best kind of jokes.
Advice: on VPS providers
Today /. is hitting a new low.
/., and no I'm not new here (check the number). It still galls me that there is NOTHING BUT jokes about this case.
I read about 15 posts here, every one of them a joke about Reiser, ReiserFS, the missing body, or Unix in general.
Is there anyone here who remembers that a woman is missing and presumably murdered? There are two children who have done nothing wrong, but are now effectively parentless, living with their grandmother.
Yeah, I know this is
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
Tell that to Postgresql
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Depends on what language you're using, or even the implementation of the language.
There's plenty that distinguish NULL from a zero value.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_George_Haigh
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Start cutting off fingers,.. He'll confess the whereabouts of Nina. I'll take bets he'll cave after the second finger.
I was kind of on the fence about all this, as you never get a true/complete picture from the reporting.
Until I read, however, that he had removed the front passenger seat from his car so he 'could sleep in the car', and then claimed that he threw away the seat (or was unable to produce it).
That goes against the instinct of every geek-like person I've met - they'd all keep the seat, so they could replace it later if they needed to use it, or wanted to sell the car, etc. "I'll keep it just in case."
That was the bit of his story that made me think "uh oh".
Good job I wasn't on the jury, eh? :)
And no error correction or backup.
Infuriate left and right
They should at least rename it to try to distance the software as much as possible from its creator....
Nah. I may be a dorky white guy who's never been in a real fight, but now that I'm using a murderer's filesystem I feel, like, totally gangsta.
Don't take that away from me.
He's only doing this because the body will eventually be found anyway
He is only doing what? According to the article (no I am not new here, yes you should have read it anyway), he is meely being offered the opportunity. He hasn't admitted to squat.
Incidentally, you are not the first person to say "I told you so." And even if it turns out that Hans is guilty, the fact remains that during the trial, there wasn't enough evidence to believe that he was guilty (not that a lack of evidence would ever stop a typical set of jurors from convicting someone they thought was weird).
Perhaps this was his first attempt at implementing the missing "dump".
(Honestly, the lack of dump/restore equivalents in reiserfs was just one of the many elements that marked is as an amateurish effort that should never have been hyped up to the level it was. Yeah, it was fast for certain things, but fast in the way of a rice cooker with nitrous injection, and while useful for impressing the kids on the block, it had no place racing at Le Mans.)
NULL, zero, NaN, and undef are all distinct constructs which are not completely interchangable, though some computing languages allow you to interchange some of them.
As far as I'm aware:
Synon (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synon). <Shudder>
Or not if he encrypts the body.
Man, you freakin' me out! You say: " . . . even if the greater good won out through a horrible perversion of due process." Do you really mean to imply that a disconnect between the "greater good" and "due process" is a desirable thing? Looks to me like the jurors were smart and worthy of the public's trust. There was TONS of evidence presented to convince a REASONABLE person beyond a REASONABLE doubt that the man killed his wife.
I wonder if this guy was right... we will know if they describe the place the body is found o.O
HTML is obsolete. It's time for a new, simpler and richer markup language.
Am I the only one who got the inline Flash ad image for a Russian dating service on this
Karma: Excellent, but still won't get you laid.
#ifdef __cplusplus
#define NULL 0
#else
#define NULL ((void *)0)
#endif
More about NULL
Thanks, V.I.N.CENT...
Just because he's an evil genius it does not change the fact that he's evil. It's the OJ Simpson of our community.
I don't see why we should name a filesystem after this guy.
I can't think of any language or system offhand in which NULL implies zero. What are you referring to?
C and C++, for starters. In what system where "NULL" (as distinct from "null") is actually a defined term does it not mean zero*?
NULL is valueless, empty, nothing. It might be used in the context of a null set, in which case the set is empty, but this isn't the same as a set which contains a single entry that is a zero, it is simply outright empty. If you ask if 0 == 0, the result is true, if you ask if NULL == 0, the answer is false, because the NULL is nothingness. If you ask if NULL == NULL, the answer is still false, because neither value can match anything.
No, NULL is a pointer, and a pointer is an unsigned integer. You can't assign the value of "valueless" to an integer. You can assign zero. In the vast majority of systems, the comparison of "NULL == 0" is true, and thus of course "NULL == NULL" is also true.
Hell, even in java, "null == null" would return true. That's the whole point of having a 'null' value; being able to compare other pointers and references to this value, to see if they are valid.
* Of course since it's just a #define value in C, it can be different and there are always exceptions. In fact I worked on a system at IBM where they defined NULL as some non-zero 64-bit value, simply because they wanted to force programmers to use if (pointer != NULL) instead of the lazier (but usually equally correct) if (pointer). Personally I think this created as many bugs as it prevented.
The enemies of Democracy are
Actually it might be less effective (Danish, can't be bothered to find an English version).
HAND.
He DID do it! Nice to know the truth, I guess, horrible as it is. Will ReiserFS be able to continue?
Anastasia International.com, Quality Russian Dating Service...
Whoever chooses the ads really has a very dark humor
Is because the defense brought it up. The prosecution isn't going to go bothering with someone after they have a conviction. Turns out prosecutors are rather busy, there's a lot of cases ranging from the petty to the severe and they have to spend time dealing with them.
So what happens with something like this is the defense lawyer finally manages to get through to Hans that he's fucked and he is open to the idea of dealing. So the defense attorney contacts the prosecutor and says "Hypothetically, if my client could tell you where the body was, what could you do for him?" They then negotiate. The lawyer acts as a buffer so that there's never any admission of anything, should the deal not go through, but everyone knows what is really going on.
NULL is valueless, empty, nothing. It might be used in the context of a null set, in which case the set is empty, but this isn't the same as a set which contains a single entry that is a zero, it is simply outright empty. If you ask if 0 == 0, the result is true, if you ask if NULL == 0, the answer is false, because the NULL is nothingness. If you ask if NULL == NULL, the answer is still false, because neither value can match anything.
I hate that reasoning. The empty set is unique: A set A and B are equal if both A is a subset of B and B is a subset of A. A is a subset of B in the case that each of its elements is also an element of B. Symbolically, (ForAll)x(A(x)->B(x)). It is, in fact, true that every element of an empty set is an element of another empty set. That is, if A is a null set, and B is another null set, every element of A is in B (since there are none, this is "vacuously true"). But the same reasoning implies that A is a subset of B, which means they are equal.
(I swear, I'm not following you around, I just happened upon two of your posts :)).
The "special custody" is called "forvaring" (as I'm sure you know) and basically means that they are imprisoned indefinitely (without the possibility of parole) at the discretion of the court (iirc), but there is always a theoretical chance that they might be released. As you rightly say, this is usually reserved for extremely dangerous individuals and in practice very few (if any) people on "forvaring" are ever actually released.
HAND.
All the armchair lawyers with only a hazy notion of what's going on. No, finding the body DOESN'T mean that first degree murder wasn't proven. It means that he got a deal. This happens ALL the time in our legal system. Deals are made for lesser sentences and lesser charges in trade for cooperation. In this manner, most cases don't go to trial. So if he cooperates, they'll give him a lower sentence. Part of that would mean changing the charge in this case, since first degree murder is generally a "life with out parole" situation.
Had they found the body, a first degree murder conviction would have been all that much easier. This is just a deal, nothing more.
I never really assumed Hans was either guilty or innocence. Based on information in the press, it seemed as if The State had a circumstantial case but possibly with holes. I had always hoped he was innocent; he was making a positive contribution to a part of society of which I am a member. That contribution will be missed. But I do hope that just has been or will be served in this case.
Is that premeditation doesn't need to be extensive. If you planned for even 5 minutes to kill someone before doing it, that's 1st degree murder. So it is plenty possible to have a 1st degree murder that was very poorly planned. It is just a question of did you kill them in the heat of a moment (like in an argument or something) or did you think about it first and decide it was a good idea.
Also remember that some of this may have been planned way in advance. One of Hans' obvious problems is that he suffers from SMFU syndrome, Smartest MotherFucker in the Universe syndrome. He thinks he's WAAAAAY smarter than everyone else. Thus, he might very well plan things poorly because he's convinced that: 1) People are too stupid to notice anything wrong and 2) He can always explain it away since he's so smart.
So this may have, in fact, been quite planned out, just poorly planned since Hans is a geek who's knowledge is in computers and not forensics. Remember that plenty of knowledge and intelligence is domain specific. A mafia hitman might not have as high an IQ as a computer programmer, but he probably understands the police and legal system a lot better, and people as well.
oj simpson's case was skewered in this country by race
No, it was more like, he stabbed the two to death, a jealous lover, and he obviously got away with it.
This is my sig.
What's interesting to me is that, the whole time, the prosecution was playing these dramatic court-room antics (maybe that's standard in capital murder, I don't know) about how obviously guilty the defendant was. Now that guilt is presumed by verdict, they're bartering with the defendant for information, which is a dead giveaway that the prosecution wasn't really on sure footing. They apparently *need* a body (and all the details about how the murder was executed therein entailed) to make things tidy from an investigative standpoint, or why bother cutting the defendant a deal, especially if the criminal act is as egregious as the prosecution always made it out to be? Emotional closure for the children would be a nice added benefit, but I doubt that would be the primary motivation in doing this kind of thing. Of course, all of this is going on the premise that the prosecution really is solidly interested in finding a body, and that the defendant isn't bluffing or playing mind games. Side-note: it doesn't really matter whether this came about from the defendant offering a body in exchange for lessened charges or the prosecution offering lessened charges in hopes of getting more information; the key point is, either way, the prosecution is heavily interested in the body, or they wouldn't bother, since it otherwise wouldn't add much to the record if it were to be accidentally exhumed (for example, in land development).
/lost+found?
On a less serious note: always keeping an ace up the sleeve with a missing body... maybe that's the reason why reiserfs doesn't have a
--TheOrangeSquid Is it any wonder things seem so awry? We swim in a sea of confusion and don't have to think to survive
Does anyone else see this becoming an episode of Monk?
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
Here's an example from Baltimore County, Maryland.
But in a modern judicial system that cannot be the case. The reason is very simple: criminal proceedings must be evidence based. There is no evidence for the existence of a god or gods.
Fast on the heels of Ballmer's tantrums and chair throwing, the BSD community was today wracked again by the borderline personality disorders and rageaholics that permeate the open source movement. Theo De Raadt, founder of the Open BSD Brigade, in an apparent fit of anger, threw his fist through a wall as he was cussing out an acolyte of Chairman Richard Stallman, leader of the competing marxist organization, the Free Stalin Foundation. Hans Reiser, an open source maven who murdered his wife in cold blood, commented from prison that open source programmers had no abnormal personality problems, and were all "very smart people, very intelligent." Eric Raymon, fresh from a trip to the Paul Revere Institute Convention and Bondage Festival in Las Vegas, echoed these comments: "What the world doesn't understand, is that we are geniuses. There is nothing wrong with using strong language to intimidate idiotarians and freedom hating anti-gun liberazis". Steve Jobs, emerging from a meditation chamber in his northern california home, opined that "he would fire half his open source staff" that night, as they had failed to properly implement a bitwise portrait of the mona lisa on the back of the motherboard for the new Apple Yojimbo motherboard family, slated to debut this fall. The BeOS developers, currently washing dishes at a Sacramento Olive Garden, had the following comments: "Yeah, we are kinda bummed that we lost all that money. But frankly, I'm kind of glad to be done with those freaks. Apple, Microsoft, Lunix, what a bunch of creeps and sociopaths." Echoed his boss "Johnny called in sick so I need you to work late tonight, is that OK?"
Frosty piss posts are worthless, GNAA posts are worthless and hurtful, but they are the least of this site's neuroses.
I had a hard time with the vanishing seat to his honda, and also with the testimony from his son that descibes to me his father carrying his wife's body rolled into a rug o the basement. Yet I was hoping that he was innocent and maybe his ex wife's former
boyfriend did it. Well.. when the verdict was read he appeared guilty because it appeared that he said "I did it for the kids". well.. I'm sure now he sealed his fate. I bet the Russian mob will snuff him within a year.
Looks like I won't have to be eating a shit sandwhich [can't find post]. I said I would if she was found alive in Russia when many of you nerds kept claiming she might be alive still. Seriously, I can't believe you people actually thought he was innocent. They should do a study on you all to see what motivated you all, psychologically, to cling to hope he was innocent when it was obvious he wasn't. Theoretically you're all smarter than an average jury member, but thank God you weren't on that jury.
In PHP:
0 == false == NULL
but,
0 !== false !== NULL
OK, so apparently he's guilty in fact, not just in the eyes of 12 jurors.
This sounds like a dumb move, legally. His case could have been appealed at some point.
The article doesn't actually say that he offered to disclose the location of the body. Instead it uses a lot of weasel words to *imply* that he might have done such a thing, without saying it.
The offer says that a "source" indicated that "overtures" had been made.
Note all the things it *doesn't* say, like if the overtures were coming *from* Reiser's team, or going *to* it.
>The source also cautioned that it remains to
>be seen whether Reiser would follow through
>with the proposal.
Why would that be a question if the source was from Reiser's team, or if Reiser had made the overture?
I think it's likely that he's guilty, but this is article uses so many weasel words that I can't take it seriously. It sounds like someone is trying to put a spin on a story.
No Russian mother would ever leave her kids alone, no exceptions. Yeah right. Mothers in most societies are more or less devoted to their children with some spread around the mean. Maybe in some cultures the mother-kid relation is a bit stronger, I can accept that. But your absolutist view just sounds like its rooted in racist preconceptions. If you're going to make such strong statements about anyone or anything, you'd damn well back it up with strong evidence. Anecdotes don't count.
Note: I'm not arguing any position in the court case, I'm arguing against your 'I told you so.' A statement containing an accidentally right answer based on a faulty rationale is still a wrong statement. That's why on tests you don't get points if you provide the 'right' answer when the calculation is faulty.
Comp was $90/day, transportation and parking, day care expenses, plus morning snacks, lunch, afternoon snacks, and if it was a really bad week, the judge would order that we be taken to a REAL restaurant for lunch (linen tableclothes, etc., not a "mac-meal"). This is completely tax-free, at both the provincial and federal levels. Its not like you have a choice to serve. People have even been grabbed off the street by the court sherrif (with the assistance of the police) when the jury pool was exhausted prematurely.
Considering that a murder trial can easily cost over a quarter million, there's no reason to starve the jury or give them even more to worry about than they already have.
Additionally, jurors can request up to 6 hours of psychological counseling each if they ask for it, from the professional psychologist or psychiatrist of their choice, after trials that are particularly stressful.
It's reasonable, because of the burdens that some trials (murder, sex-related crimes) place on jurors. You can't ask someone to sit on a jury for a month and have them too distracted about how they're going to make their rent or pay for their kids' daycare, especially if they're a single parent. The defendent wouldn't be receiving a fair trial in such cases.
Kevin Smith on Prince
"Heisenberg also worked for the Nazi's"
Are you certain of that? I'm not.
$ perl -e 'print "Nyah-nyah\n" if undef == 0'
Nyah-nyah
I have a question about the U.S. legal system.
This guy testified under oath saying that as far as he knew his wife abandoned him and the kids and therefore had no idea about her whereabouts. (They didn't believe him and declared him guilty or whatever, but that's another issue.)
But now it turns out that he does know where the body is (regardless of whether he killed her or not). That means that he previously lied under oath.
Shouldn't he be liable for perjury?
Or is this another symptom of a flawed system?
Maybe he believed her life force longed to be free.
The current 25-to life is pretty harsh, and expensive to boot. Let's just bury him (alive) next to her and be done with it. Reduces his sentence pretty drastically, and saves society a shitload of $$$.
The contest for ages has been to rescue liberty from the grasp of executive power. -- Daniel Webster
"Null" is German for zero :-P
The same thing can and does periodically happen in Arizona (and I believe in California as well). There was a case that made local news in AZ a few years back -- a so-called "deadbeat dad" was in custody, but would have walked for lack of a jury. The judge felt that would be a miscarriage of justice, since the man in question was difficult to track down; the judge wanted to hold him responsible for child support payments he had been missing.
Tycho Brahms was murdered by Kepler by means of mercury poisoning. Yet we use Kepler's equations for planetary motions, calculating how get space probes exactly where they need to be, etc. It is very unlikely he was the first or last to kill in order to move up the scientific totem pole.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
That's actually a very reasonably policy. "We expect your undivided attention in this legal matter. We'll value your time accordingly."
The last jury selection I attended, everyone in the room was concerned about being chosen for the multi-week domestic abuse case. Several single-parents tried to be excused, but all were denied because covering for their kids was considered "an inconvenience" and not a necessity. I saw exactly one person be excused from jury duty prior to the selection process - an elderly woman on oxygen and taking hallucinogenic meds. If you're not doped-up and can fog a mirror, you qualify for jury duty in the States.
I did a little searching, and Maryland is par for the course on jury comp. The data is a little stale, but it's representative. Your employer can't legally fire you while you're on jury duty, but he can force you to burn all your leave and then take a leave-of-absence (i.e. no pay.) $15 per day won't cover beans. Minimum wage in the US is currently $5.85/hr, moving up to $6.55/hr in July. $15 is about 2.5 hours of minimum-wage labor. A full-time minimum-wage employee is earning $46.80/day. Basically, regardless of your employment status, jury duty in the States is "punishment."
The DA has long since stopped worrying about "reasonable doubt".
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
Hang the bastard !
He cut her up and buried her under a b-tree
Maybe 'deserved' is too much of a problematic word to use. However, if someone did the same to me as what Hans' wife did to him, well, I'd love for them to die. Painfully.
And would EF be Edgar Friendly?
All he had to do was sign it.
In many C/C++ language runtimes, the fist few bytes of the data segment of the library are left empty, and that happens to be where a NULL pointer points sometimes. FWIW
Actually, the issue of Braun's involvement in building weapons is neither here nor there: if you regarded involvement in the Manhattan Project (which clearly killed more people than the V2) as a moral crime sufficient to render people unemployable, the US and the UK have no physics for about thirty years after the war. But the use of slave labour in the Mittelwerk _is_ an issue, and something he should have been properly challenged over.
I wonder if they will find victims of other murderers stored in the same location.
What would have happened if they had brought their kids along and said "sorry for the inconvenience." :-)
Or if they had left their kids unattended, and when someone complains, tells child protective services that a judge has declared that child care is a convenience, and not a necessity?
Kevin Smith on Prince
Kevin Smith on Prince
Nah, its just me. I like to initial all my quotables.
Occam's razor is the blind faith in the natural selection of least resistance and in universal oversimplification. -- EF
OJFreeSoWhyNotMeFS?
No, they didn't !
[insert lame sig here]
His auto-biography was named "I aimed for the stars". It should have been subtitled "But I hit London".