Hans Reiser and the "Geek Defense" Strategy

lseltzer alerts us to a story in the Washington Post on the defense strategy in the Hans Reiser murder trial. "In the courtroom where Hans Reiser is on trial for murder, [the evidence] might appear to indicate guilty knowledge. But his attorneys cast it as evidence of an innocence peculiar to Hans, a computer programmer so immersed in the folds of his own intellect that he had no idea how complicit he was making himself appear. 'Being too intelligent can be a sort of curse,' defense counsel William Du Bois said. 'All this weird conduct can be explained by him, but he's the only one who can do it. People who are commonly known as computer geeks are so into the field.'"

All geeks are the same

[Anonymous Coward]

Most of us have soaked our floorboards after we removed the passenger seat.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

/. defense

[tverbeek]

I'm too anti-social to be a threat to society.

The Geek Defense Argument

[mincognito]

1. killing ones wife requires having a wife to kill
2. the accused is a geek
3. geeks cannot have wives
4. the defense rests

Re:My Suspicion

[MightyMartian]

Nina *may* have gone to Russia. Didn't her family supposedly have some "connections"?

Well, at least some symbolic links.

Re:The Geek Defense Argument

[Renderer of Evil]

OK, so you've established that Reiser is not a geek... So what is he?

Hans Reiser is a general-purpose, journaled collection of cells that relies on DNA metadata to reduce internal fragmentation.

beyond the shadow of a doubt

[hxnwix]

I and many of my geek friends would have a hard time proving our innocence if such accusations were leveled against us.

Imagine if they looked in our basements... I can hear the cross examiner already: "sir, can you explain to us what made you so angry that you shot this Compaq server 382 times with a .22 rifle? Do you usually shoot things that annoy you? You said that computers are important to you - so important that you like to shoot them repeatedly. Was your wife important to you? Did she sometimes annoy you? No further questions."

Fortunately, we are innocent until proven guilty...

Re:Desperate Twinkies

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm no genious

Yeah, no shit.

Re:peers?

[DNS-and-BIND]

Let's see: go back to my code and my cubicle, or deal with a problem that is purely judgement and requires a lot of thinking about and dealing with other people?

Re:/. defense

[ShakaUVM]

Nah, the Slashdot defense is: I couldn't possibly have had a wife!

Re:All geeks are the same

[Asztal_]

Who the hell commits a crime with pair of books on crime in their vehicle, and then leave it all there for someone to find. Programmers know too much about allocation and management of objects to not destroy them when its detrimental they no longer exist.

Maybe he was foiled by non-deterministic Garbage Collection.

Easy way out ;)

[Anonymous Coward]

"Was your wife important to you? Did she sometimes annoy you?"

Sure your honor, but my wife didn't run Windows like my PC did.

Re:We are all the same.

[jimdread]

Why are they picking on Hans Reiser for strange behavior? Read this quote from the article about what his father is doing:

"His undergraduate thesis is on how if you change the perspective, the reality is different," said Ramon Reiser, the defendant's mathematician father, folding a pair of pants in the courtroom hallway as he waited to testify.

Ramon Reiser was waiting in the courthouse to testify in his son's murder trial, and he was folding a pair of pants. Who takes their laundry to the courthouse? Why was Ramon Reiser standing around folding up pants??? Something very suspicious is going on here! Was Hans's mathematician father sending secret signals with the pants? Some sort of topology-laundry cipher system?

Re:A curse I've had to live with . . .

[gbjbaanb]

I guess you would have mentioned your immense modesty too, if you weren't so modest :)

Re:All geeks are the same

[dgatwood]

I think you'd call that manus rea. :-D

Sigh. Maybe the lawyers will laugh, anyway.

Re:All geeks are the same

[spintriae]

Believe it or not, I have been in a situation where I had a removed front passenger seat and a soaked footwell.

Oh, I believe you. I too have had to remove my passenger seat and hose down the floor board. Mainly because they were soaked in my ex-wife's blood...

Since then I always keep tampons in the glove compartment.

Re:What serious evidence is there against him?

[Anonymous Coward]

'Serious BDSM' is what I do sometimes...

If BDSM is not your piece of cake, fine, but do not put it at the same level as killing people because you simply do not understand it.

*sighs*

You OS X people are all alike. And it's "BSD", not "BDSM."

Re:Desperate Twinkies

[Ozan]

No, I would think more of an inverted Chewbacca defense:

William Du Bois

Ladies and gentlemen of this supposed jury, the district attorney would certainly want you to believe that my client killed his wife. And they make a good case. Hell, even I almost think it was him! But, ladies and gentlemen of this supposed jury, I have one final thing I want you to consider. Ladies and gentlemen, this is Alan Turing. Turing was a Mathematician from England. He came up with what is now called a Turing Machine. Now think about it: that does make perfect sense!

Paul Hora

Damn it! He's using the Turing Defense!

William Du Bois

Now why would Alan Turing, a Mathematician from England would invent something like a Turing Machine? Because it helps to show that some problems are never solvable by computing. Does that make any sense? Yes it does.
Imagine a Turing Machine and a set of instructions. Can anybody tell, if the machine, running those instructions will ever stop? And more important: can we program a Turing Machine, so that it decides whether a set of instructions would cause a Turing Machine to halt eventually? But more important, you have to ask yourself: What does this have to do with this case? Everything. Ladies and gentlemen, this case completedly depends on it! It does make a lot of sense! Look at me. I'm a lawyer defending a software engineer, and I'm talkin' about Alan Turing!
Now how can it be, that this halting problem is undecideable? Because, if we hypotheticaly have a Turing Machine that solves the halting problem, we could use it to construct another Turing Machine that does not halt when it should, and thus, when given to itself to test for halting, would contradict its own behavior!
Does that make sense? Ladies and gentlemen, I am making perfect sense! And so you have to remember, when you're in that jury room deliberatin' and conjugatin' the verdict, do you know wheter you will ever stop deliberatin'? No! Ladies and gentlemen of this supposed jury, you will never know! If the jury doesn't halt, you must acquit! The defense rests!

Re:All geeks are the same

[Anonymous Coward]

He killed her because he didn't like the ReiserFS-less version of OpenBDSM that she was running.

Re:All geeks are the same

[that this is not und]

Years ago I had a VW Beetle (real one, not the roundy rabbit sold now) I pulled the passenger and the back seat. It was kinda like a little Van after that. I didn't haul bodies in it, but could have packed in maybe five or six with no problem.

Re:All geeks are the same

[that this is not und]

Hell, Apple recycled the NeXT OS.

Re:All geeks are the same

[Capitalist1]

> They're orthogonic.

They're orthogonal. I reject your entire argument.

Re:Detective fiction

[TapeCutter]

"There were dozens of instances where my arse was tanned because it was 'clear' I had done something wrong when in fact I was innocent."

Bill Cosby was right - "Parents aren't intrested in justice, they just want quiet".

Re:All geeks are the same

[rubberglove]

s/ innocent person/yone/