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Hans Reiser Sued By Own Kids For $15 Million
New submitter haruchai writes "The Reiser kids, now aged 12 and 11, have had a lawsuit filed against the former Linux developer, inventor of ReiserFS and convicted murderer of the mother of his children, to the tune of $15 million. It's believed he may have hidden assets and a judgment is sought so a search for these can be conducted."
A judge denied requests that the kids testify or return to the U.S. for their own well-being.
This just shows that FOSS fanatics are maniacs in real life too, and can't be trusted. I mean come on, you put your business into hands of these maniacs? Maniacs!
Sure...
His kids don't know what the heck is going on. As always, the kids are just tools in the machinations of the adults.
Hmmm, I guess the guardians can't wait that long. Besides, what are they going to do if he doesn't cooperate, throw him in jail?
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
Come on, man, you know perfectly well why the story was posted: because it's going to get upwards of 200 comments and a whole lot of pageviews because we're all morbidly interested in the nextgen filesystem developer turned murderer.
Now, what you really meant to say is: Fellow geeks, we ought not to take interest in this story.
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
It's believed he may have hidden assets and a judgment is sought so a search for these can be conducted.
Probably in an vnode. Try "reiserfsck".
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
I wonder who really initiated the suit. Not likely the kids: what do they know about money, at that age, let alone law suits? Why would those children suspect the existence of hidden assets? They probably don't even know what the word means.
So other than these two children, who's going to benefit? Is this initiated by some lawyers that do the suing on behalf of the children? Is it initiated by their legal guardian who hopes to get access to (part of) that money?
The only reason the bank protected peoples' money for many years in the first place, and why Switzerland draws so many international deposits, is because they have a long record of effective government, an independent legal system and bank controls. Moreover, given that most modern governments guarantee deposits up to a certain level (100k CHF in this case), much of the depository risk is borne by the government and ultimately the tax payer, not the bank. And the bank has already made its (legitimate) profit by having access to the principal to lend against for many years. But hey, when you can ignore those inconvenient facts to privatize profits while socializing the risk, you gotta do it, right?
It's five in the morning here and I am in no mood to be charitable.
The lawsuit was initiated by the children's grandmother. Their legal guardian. Her lawyers are working pro bono.
No fees. No slice of the pie. Got that?
Moving on.
Reiser is defending himself.
In a way, he is always defending himself. Reiser, it seems, can do no wrong.
He is the one who asked the judge to drag the kids into court.
"Why?" you ask.
What he wanted to do was to draw them into a grandiose scheme to promote his new and improved conspiracy theories and defense for the murder. The judge isn't playing along.
He claims his wife was abusing the kids, that she had Factitious disorder by proxy --- often referred to as Munchausen syndrome by proxy --- where a caregiver harms or even kills someone they are in charge of in order to gain sympathy and attention. During the 2008 trial, Reiser alluded to that as well, accusing his wife of having the disease when she wanted to get their son surgery for severe hearing loss.
In the unlawful death case, he now says why: ''I defended my children from harm.'' He added that, by murdering his wife, ''I stopped multiple felonies by doing so.''
In his papers, he accuses the courts, the prison system, county children's services, his trial attorneys and others of conspiring against him, during his murder trial and now in the civil case.
''There are extensive legal grounds under multiple arguments for defending an innocent child when the state will not, at the cost of a non-innocent party's life,'' Hans Reiser wrote.
Convicted of Murder, Linux Guru Hans Reiser Returns to Court to Fight Civil Suit
"Wired" has it all, in Reiser's own handwriting.
More.
The beginning of Monday's trial was marked by impatience from the judge and the children's legal team. The complaint against Reiser was originally filed in August 2008 by the children's maternal grandmother and legal guardian, Irina Sharanova. The case has been stalled as Reiser filed various motions to delay proceedings and claimed that he has not had adequate access to his legal documents while at Pleasant Valley State Prison in Coalinga.
''This trial has been pending for a really long time,'' said Judge Dennis Hayashi about the pretrial claims. ''I also made it clear that I'm not delaying this any further. ... We need to move on.''
Reiser, dressed in his orange prison uniform and appearing antsy at Hayashi's denials, has subpoenaed his children to appear in court.
They are living in Russia with Sharanova and are not expected at the trial, [Sharanova's attorney] said.
"I personally don't think it would do the children any good to come here and testify in this trial,"
"They'd have to relive what they went through as very young children."
Both of the children were at their father's house in the Montclair district when the killing is believed to have taken place.
Jury selection begins in Hans Reiser civil trial
His mouth was what got him convicted in the first place. The prosecution's case against him was circumstantial. It was fairly good, but as I said circumstantial, no physical evidence, not even any evidence his wife was dead. While they can and do get convictions on that (they wouldn't bring it to trial if it never worked) it is harder.
There is a reasonable chance he may have gotten off had he kept his trap shut and let his legal team work. They did have an at least somewhat plausible theory: That his wife had run off to Russia. While that isn't without issues to poke holes in, it might just have been plausible enough, combined with the lack of physical evidence, to generate reasonable doubt.
However he insisted on taking the stand and that was the end of him. Between his completely arrogant attitude and his logical inconsistencies, the prosecution was able to just skewer him on cross examination, sealing the outcome.
The problem is he has a sever case of something many geeks seem to have: Smartest Motherfucker in the Universe Syndrome. He really believes he is WAY smarter than everyone else and he's not afraid to let everyone know it. While he may consider that he's doing people a favour by "enlightening" them to his superior intellect, most people see that as being an arrogant prick and don't like him for it. Also, it leads him to believe he can get away with shit like, say, murder. He can do as he pleases because he's so much smarter than everyone, there's no way those poor dummies can ever catch up with him.
Hence, this bullshit. He still thinks he's smarter than the courts, the police, the lawyers.