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Hans Reiser Gets Sentence of 15-To-Life
mallumax writes "Hans Reiser was today handed a prison sentence of 15-to-life for murdering his wife. Earlier this year, he pleaded guilty and led police to his wife's body. His jury trial concluded in April with Reiser's first-degree murder conviction. That carries a 25-to-life term, but the authorities, in a backroom deal, later offered him 15-to-life if he produced his wife's body and waived any rights to appeal his conviction."
Several other readers contributed coverage at SFGate.
Most interesting to the geek community is this: What are the terms of his imprisonment? 1) Will he have fairly regular internet access? 2) Will he be allowed to type...perhaps code some? 3) Inmates are regularly allowed to read all they want and take skills courses and learn new crafts...does this extend to a geek's leanings? With one's wife already gone...one would have a great deal of peace coding...especially if all your meals were provided at regular times and you were guaranteed a fairly clean set of sheets to sleep on. While I do not advocate killing anybody...it does have advantages if you were a hardcore geek. It would be like college, except without all that silly dating and learning. Just sit in your new 'dorm' room and code.
Who is this that even the wind and the waves obey Him? Surely this computer must submit also!
He's probably guilty, but I don't like the system of offering people lower sentences for "cooperating".
If all evidence points against you, even if you're innocent, you're likely to confess to get a lower sentence. IMO, there is ABSOLUTELY NO DIFFERENCE to the inquisition, where people would confess having sex with the devil in order to get off with less (in that case only an execution, instead of days of torture followed by execution.)
Hans Reiser's carelessness with his wife's murder is typical of his carelessness with his file system design: he came up with complex arrangement to reduce his perceived risk, and focused on it to the point where all else was ignored and became destructive. Then he tried to deny that it was his fault, with contrived and obviously false claims of innocence based on how clever he was rather than the actual timelines and evidence.
Given the poor history of ReiserFS and its tendency to zero files, to lie about the availablility of files in failing hardware, or to destroy itself if you actually run the repair tools on it, why would you want him to continue to work on it?