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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.
I hope this thread has minimal snarky sarcastic comments, this is just sad all around.
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?
Anyone else consider the Anastasia advert to be in bad taste, given the context of the story?
At the bottom of the
Yeah, but by now, I reckon they'll only find a few bits.
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.
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.
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.
The summary is deceiving dude. The judge just speculates he's going to reveal the location for a reduction of sentence.
There's seriously nothing saying Hans even knows where it is.
The opposite, I think. The parole board isn't there to second-guess the jury, or give you time off "just in case". They assume that because you were found guilty, you are guilty and your protestations to the contrary are simply because you refuse to face up to the fact you are guilty, so you can't yet be paroled.
This means, of course, that if you are innocent, it sucks to be you when you front up to a parole board.
Disclaimer: I garnered my knowledge from someone who was innocent but in jail, and also the movie Double Jeopardy, starring Ashley Judd.
When they came for the communists, I said "He's next door. Take him away. Goddam commies."
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.
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.
> 15 years alone is going to mess him even up..
Like make him so crazy he might kill the mother of his children?
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.
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.
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.
Well, really is quite simple for him. First he gangs up with his buddy who is similarly innocent but banged up because he was obviously framed, busts out of the joint with said buddy, preferably using some death-defying feat, then gets some guns, and goes on a shooting rampage trying to hide from the cops and FBI, in order to find the guy who framed them all (probably Ballmer, you just know it) then in a close-called thing, as the FBI is closing in, get the bad guy to confess as they are listening in, thus removing all need for a new trial and which also neatly accounts for the dead bodies (after all, you're now proven innocent, so killing all the bad guys' henchmen is just forgotten about).
Disclaimer: I garnered my legal knowledge from the movie Tango and Cash and others starring Mel Gibson.
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.
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.
I get all my legal knowledge from Law and Order so this could be all wrong.
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
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? :)
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.
How many thousands upon thousands of people died today?
How many people here know Hans or Nina Reiser?
Every time something like this happens, the tissue brigade (not that one, the other one) comes out berating others for not being all solemn about it. I don't know Hans or Nina Reiser, or their kids. If I could have intervened to stop the murder of this complete stranger, I would have, but pretending that this emotionally affects me in any way, shape, or form, is just being a drama queen.
It reminds me of when I was a kid and we used to drive out to my grandparents house for Easter on Good Friday and between 12 and 3 - the hours we'd be traveling - my mother would insist that there be no music or discussion in the car, because, you know, Jesus suffered on the cross two thousand years ago during those hours (supposedly). And she's screw on this phony bullshit look of solemnity and I'd just want to ask my father, "Is she REALLY serious?"
I wasn't listen to my Walkman, couldn't play electronic games - nothing. I had to sit there in the car in the fucking purgatory of the Poconos and pretend to be really upset about Jesus dying (which is particularly stupid if you already know the end of the story), but lucky me, I had several days, and several hours, of *church* in front of me to look forward to. Hooray.
This particular case is of interest only because many of us use MurderFS (sorry, sorry, shouldn't make light of this), and if we didn't, this murder really wouldn't make a damn bit of difference any more than the thousands of other deaths happening around the world right now.
As for joking about death, murder, mayhem, genocide - as far as I am concerned, the worst atrocities our species are capable of are definitely worth humor. Humor may be the only thing that even comes close to standing up to the very real and unpleasant reality of our own mortality. There is a big difference between joking about this or any other serious event, and somehow taking pleasure in other peoples' loss. Humor takes a little of the wind out of tragedy. Or it's supposed to, anyway.
I don't know Hans or Nina Reiser, nor the guy on his deathbed in Swaziland who is about to expire right now, and I'm not going to sit here and pretend I am in any way emotionally invested in this enough to alter my behavior. This is how the human psyche works, thank god, or we'd do nothing but sob ourselves to death - what matters is what happens to our respective tribes. Everything outside of that is merely fodder for the rest of humanity to go into phony mourning in a display to everyone of how sensitive they are.
Fuck that shit.
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:
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
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
Not having a body doesn't count much these days as 'reasonable doubt,' as plenty of jurors can imagine scenarios in which the body would not be found.
A lack of strong evidence could represent a reasonable doubt. While they found blood in Reiser's vehicle, it was only trace amounts and those trace amounts could be explained by circumstances other than 'he murdered her and dragged the body around in his car'.
However, I think what probably did him in was the eyewitness testimony, particularly that of his son, who changed his story from 'Hans and Nina left separately' to 'Hans and Nina left together and only Hans came back'. In the minds of the jurors, that must have seemed particularly damning.
OTOH, a different set of jurors might have seen it differently -- after all, the boy did change his story, so they might think "how do we know which time he told the truth?"
I dunno. But I think he did it. So what do I know?
My blog
Here's an example from Baltimore County, Maryland.
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."
Tycho Brahms? Are you sure it wasn't Johannes Brahe?