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

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

Re:All geeks are the same

I wouldn't vote to convict based on that, however damning it may look, anymore than I would vote to convict of a computer crime because they were using encryption. Maybe he did kill her, I don't know, but there's some serious doubt about whether she could be hiding out in Russia or dead at the hands of the ex-boyfriend who admitted to killing nearly a dozen people.

Re:All geeks are the same

Despite the fact that Sean Sturgeon is a known killer, Nina Reiser was a physician, and the fact that apparently they found "Books on Crime" along with the sleeping bag and blood samples on the pillar in his garage? With no body, no witnesses, and no direct evidence?

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.

I'm not saying I think he is innocent NOR that i think hes guilty. I simply think it all warrants much further investigation.

Re:All geeks are the same

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.

Re:All geeks are the same

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.

So there's no such thing as a buffer overrun, or forgetting to mate every call to malloc() with a free()?

I don't buy the "programmer geek defense". It doesn't match up with the reality, which is that you don't have to be a programmer to be an asshole. They're orthogonic. Lets look at the excuses another way:

1. The books - a "reverse psychology" ploy - figurng that he's so much smarter than everyone else, and that they'd buy into his "well, if I were guilty, why would I have such books? I'd be stupid!" Narcisssists are very much likely to think along such convoluted lines, and to believe that others will fall for their "explanations"
2. The front seat - well, if it had blood on it, he had to dispose of it, since he wasn't smart enough to know that its possible to destroy the dna evidence (if he hadn't been into reading popular books about crime scene technology, and instead read up on the subject properly, he'd have known this). The last murder trial I sat on, the dna expert said he couldn't mention the techniques that could be used to destroy the evidence (you can buy the needed stuff at your local grocery store, btw), but that no such destruction had taken place.
3. The $8k and passport. That doesn't need much of an explanation, and could be quite innocent. His wife had already grabbed $$$ from the bank account. Wouldn't YOU want to stay "liquid" in such a case? Passport - why leave it around for someone to grab when you're living in your car?

Do I believe he did it? I can't say - I'm not on the jury. However, I definitely don't buy into the defense tactic of 'geek nerds are "special" and "hard to understand"' as a "get out of jail" card.

Reiser's lawyer is making a big mistake. Sure, he's playing the "this guy is a creep" card to the jury - but he's also insulting the jury's intelligence by thinking that they won't see it for what it is - a ploy, and not evidence one way or the other. Not trusting a jury can come back and bite you - look at what happened with Jamie Thomas and the $222,000 copyright infringement award. The jurors were pissed that she lied to them [switched.com], and made it known both inside and outside the courtroom [wired.com].

"She's a liar. We wanted to send a message. I don't know what the fuck she was thinking."

Better to not take the stand, and let people suspect you're an idiot, than to take it, and prove them right.

Then there's the danger that the jurors will think - "If they really expect us to buy into this bs, they must think we just fell off a turnip truck. Sounds like what I'd expect a guilty know-it-all to do."

At the very least, the choice of tactics shows that the lawyer doesn't believe his client is innocent. Based on that, I'd say the jury will probably convict.

Re:All geeks are the same

According to reports I've read, he bought those books after he was treated as a suspect by the cops, not before the crime.

Re:All geeks are the same

"There's a sizable amount of circumstantial evidence that he did it, with little plausible explanations in his defense."

And that is the problem, circumstantial evidence should not be enough to convict. And no, the defense doesn't have to 'explain' the seat, nor does anyone need to answer 'who did it' to aquit him.

Like many Aussies, I thought this woman [wikipedia.org] was guilty simply because she came across as an unfeeling religious zelot that couldn't explain other peoples' assumptions about dingo behaviour. By no means does that imply this guy is innocent but as the judge said 'the evidence is thin'.

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

Being too intelligent is a curse I've had to live with my whole life!

But I guess it sorta goes with my outstanding good looks. :)

Gem of a quote

His signal adult achievement was ReiserFS, a file system he named for himself, unusual in the programming world. The system organizes data on Linux, the "open source" operating system.

In the same breath, they say naming something after ones own name is unusual, and refer to the OS written by a guy named Linus. Hows that for irony.

Re:Gem of a quote

In the same breath, they say naming something after ones own name is unusual, and refer to the OS written by a guy named Linus. Hows that for irony.

Linus named it FreakOS I believe. It was someone else who convinced him to rename it to Linux.

Cheers,
Ian

Actually, Linus originally picked "Freax"

http://www.freax.org/ [freax.org] has a little more info

/. defense

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

risky defense

it's very risky this type of defense. it might be seen that he's so smart, that maybe he KNEW he could use this kind of defense and planned on hiding out in the open so to speak.

personally i find it strange they aren't looking closer at the cross dressing lover who has admitted to killing people in the past.

also there is no body yet, so i don't understand how exactly they are mounting a murder case against him? for all they know this is all staged by his bitter russian bride in an attempt to get back at him, stranger things have happened.

The Geek Defense Argument

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:The Geek Defense Argument

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.

What serious evidence is there against him?

Sean Sturgeon confessed to killing eight people [wired.com]. If I were the homicide detective, you damn well better believe I'd be urging the prosecutor to dismiss the charges without prejudice so that the scope of the investigation could be brought to bear on HIM, now. The guy is into "death yoga," serious BDSM and confessed to killing eight people. The guy is a total loon based on what has come out, and he'd probably score very dangerously high on a sociopath scale. Hans might be the killer, but if I were a cop, I'd have spat my coffee out all over the report in shock when I read that Nina had gotten herself involved with a guy who sounds like a real nutjob who probably killed her.

Unless they found Nina's blood all over Reiser's car, they don't have much to go on. Even then, it's not unrealistic to think that Sturgeon might have tried to frame Reiser.

The details of this case are very sordid. I wouldn't put it past the prosecutors to be ignoring sturgeon's high probability of guilt out of pride because they "have their man." This is one of the reasons why I unabashedly support making it impossible to give a life sentence or execution without a minimum of two credible witnesses, and serious penalties (that can include execution in murder cases) for those who commit perjury.

Re:What serious evidence is there against him?

The guy is into "death yoga," serious BDSM and confessed to killing eight people. The guy is a total loon based on what has come out, and he'd probably score very dangerously high on a sociopath scale.

'Serious BDSM' is what I do sometimes, but it has nothing to do with being a sociopath!

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.

Re:What serious evidence is there against him?

No, they found items containing her blood (sleeping bag), and there was blood samples in Reisers garage.

Strangely enough though, this is one case where i would expect it to warrant further investigation as A) Nina Reiser was a physician and B) as the GP stated, Sean Sturgeon is one frightening fucking individual. That gives the knowledge necessary for such things to be possible, combined with a nature that has done such things before.

I'm not saying for sure one way or the other, but don't you think the friggan BOOKS ON CRIME they found along with it all as rather like someone padding the bill? (Plus what kind of programmer wouldn't think to properly destroy those objects so no one finds them wasting in memory heh). Not certainty by any means, but worthy of investigation.

beyond the shadow of a doubt

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...

Sense and Circumstance

The issue seems to come from the apparent weakness of the prosecution's case. The most damning part of the case seems to be that Reiser acted strangely; did odd things, said odd things, behaved in unexpected ways. That kind of thing works well to tie together strong evidence to show motives and behaviors that link the evidence to the suspect. But lacking that, the case becomes little more than "he sure SEEMS guilty." And that is, as the article mentioned one judge noting, a very thin case indeed.

So this is what the defense has to rally against. They have a client who is his own worse enemy. They have to remove the focus on irrational, unexpected behavior and shift it back to the strength of the real evidence presented by the prosecution's case. In short, they have to defeat a strategy that may give circumstantial evidence more weight than it would otherwise be given by people who don't share the same sensibilities as the defendant.

I've known plenty of technical folks (engineers, coders, sysadmins, screwdriver slingers, etc.) who are just odd birds. I've got a whole host of weird stories based on experiences working with and around these folks. Many of these stories could (and sometimes are) taken out of context to imply a lot more about the individual than they really should. I'm not at all surprised that such an issue might rear its ugly head in the aggressive atmosphere of a court of law.

Re:Desperate Twinkies

It's not the Twinkie Defense. Hans is claiming he didn't murder her, not that some bizarre psychological condition associated with being a geek should mitigate his action in some way. The psychological aspect is used only to explain why he acted so strangely and why those strange actions are not indicative of guilt. Basically, it didn't even occur to him that those actions might be seen as acting guilty.

From what I can tell, the prosecution has absolutely not proven Hans' guilt beyond the shadow of a doubt. They have not met the standard of proof required for a criminal conviction. All they have is some fairly flimsy circumstantial evidence.

But that's a separate question from whether or not I think he's guilty. And given the available evidence I can't decide either way. This case just is too bizarre. I can actually believe that Nina has managed to escape back to Russia and finagled the courts through the rest of her family into letting her children go back too. But I can also believe that Hans murdered her. Both scenarios fit the available evidence.

Re:Desperate Twinkies

You forgot to mention the other guy, Sean Sturgeon, who was also close to the victim. The dude who has confessed to killing 8 (yes, eight) people, and was dating Nina (Hans' wife). IMHO, it's more likely that Hans was reading up on how to kill Sean (or even how to avoid being killed by Sean) than how to kill Nina.

Re:Desperate Twinkies

"There is no clear motive for Hans to of killed his wife."

There are motives aplenty:

1. She cleaned out his bank account
2. She got custody of the kids
3. She was sleeping with someone else
4. She had called an end to their marriage
5. She had gone out and gotten herself a job where she specified she was now single

People have killed their former spouses over much less. There's plenty of motive.

Re:Desperate Twinkies

I agree with this. I *could* design an implement my own filesystem if I thought it was really profitable, and I'm no genious. But I also wouldn't have gone to Russia for a mail-order type bride and let her get her citizenship after having some kids, or run my business into the ground while my Russian wife stole money because I was stupid enough to let her handle the finances and not double check things myself. Sure they guy is smart, but he's also very, very stupid from the stories I here.

Re:My Suspicion

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

Well, at least some symbolic links.