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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.
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
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.
Being 1st degree or 2nd degree isn't a matter of whether you have any sympathy for him - it's a matter of whether it was premeditated (planned) - 1st degree - or unplanned in the heat of the moment (2nd degree).
The evidence one hears in the press of her blood in the car, the front seat mysteriously gone missing with no explanation, and the car hosed down inside, all might tend to point to something that was perhaps unplanned (you'd think a nerd could plan it better), but OTOH we didn't hear all the evidence, and the jury that did hear it apparently thought it was planned (maybe for the exact reasons you suggest).
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.
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.
He is a murderer
No disagreement there.
a sociopath
That is a scientific term with specific meaning. I have seen no evidence that he is.
must be imprisoned for life
Why? We let lots of murderers go after only a few years. Hell, you'll get more jail time for selling pot than you will for murder.
Oh, and if you do include yourself amongst those who might even consider killing someone over a spurt of fury or over a great disappointment, then you have serious issues my friend. I recommend a group of good mental health professionals.
Sorry to say it dude, crimes of passion are in the human genome and there is nothing you can do about it. Want proof? Ask any parent if they could kill someone who harms their children. I know I could. If anyone touched my son or daughter, there wouldn't be enough left to identify.
I used to be afraid of big dogs, I was bitten by a german sheppard when I was a kid. So, I generally avoided them. One day, I was with my son in the park and a couple loose dogs were growling, fighting, and coming toward us. Instinctively I put myself between my son and the dogs, I had to kick one in the mouth before they ran away.
This is a true story, and I tell you, it makes no difference if it is dogs or people, if its your children, you'd kill.
Since we all have the capability of murder, we have to gear our prosecution on the motivations. Self defense, perfectly understandable. Fit of rage? not as bad as cold hearted killer.
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.
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
Curiously, in C++, that definition would be invalid, even if the underlying implementation of NULL was in fact not 0.
:D
C++ has several rather odd requirements for NULL that basically come down to the following:
NULL is defined as 0, no discussion.
0, as a constant, has special behavior allowing it to be implicitly cast to any pointer type, where it will be a "NULL value" that is distinct from any valid pointer, but is not guaranteed to take any particular bit pattern.
Testing a pointer in a conditional, or casting it to bool implicitly or explicitly, results in true if the pointer is not a "NULL value" or false if it is.
The end result is that you can end up treating 0 as NULL, and treating a null pointer as 0, right up until you decide to muck about with direct memory access, at which point that all goes out the window.
Essentially, int *x = NULL; if(x) fail(); is guaranteed to not fail, while int *x = NULL; int y; memcpy(&y, &x, sizeof(y)); if(y) fail(); is not guaranteed to not fail (even if x and y are the same size.) Also, NULL == 0 is always true, and int *x = NULL; x == 0 is also always true.
As I understand it, C doesn't pin things down quite this firmly, but in the end it gives some of the same guarantees. I suspect that definition of NULL isn't technically conforming to the C language spec, though I wouldn't bet money on it - I don't know C minutiae as well as I do C++.
Now you know more about NULL in C++ than you ever really wanted to.
Breaking Into the Industry - A development log about starting a game studio.