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Hans Reiser Guilty of First Degree Murder

Posted by kdawson on Mon Apr 28, 2008 07:32 PM
from the so-much-for-the-geek-defense dept.
Government The Courts News
Anonymous Meoward writes "Today Hans Reiser was found guilty of first degree murder in Oakland, California. Quoting Wired: 'In a murder case with no body, no crime scene, no reliable eyewitness and virtually no physical evidence, the prosecution began the trial last November with a daunting task ahead... The turning point in the trial came when Reiser took the stand in his own defense March 3.' Whether he really did it or not, Hans basically just didn't know when to shut up."
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Related Stories

[+] Hans Reiser and the "Geek Defense" Strategy 738 comments
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.'"
Firehose:Hans Reiser Guilty of First Degree Murder by Anonymous Meoward (665631)
[+] Hardware: The File-System Fallout of the Reiser Verdict 605 comments
perlow writes "Yesterday, the Open Source community took an emotional hit when veteran Linux programmer Hans Reiser was convicted of first degree murder in the suspicious disappearing of his wife, Nina. While I won't go into the details of the case, as this has been covered extensively in the press, I would like to talk a little bit about how this verdict will impact the technology in play for file system dominance in our favorite Open Source operating system, Linux."
[+] News: Hans Reiser To Reveal Location of Wife's Body 882 comments
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.'"
[+] Hans Reiser Gets Sentence of 15-To-Life 553 comments
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.
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  • Free Software (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 28 2008, @07:39PM (#23231284)
    Can he work on free software from jail? He won't commercially gain from the crime and he can contribute for the good of society as a whole (in fact, provide a benefit that the world can use).
  • SHUT THE FUCK UP. Honestly, that is the advice you need. SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP. Don't talk. Don't answer questions. If you must talk, please state the following: 1) "Am I under arrest?" If YES, then say, "I want a lawyer." If NO, get up and leave. If you co-operate and help them out and do them a favor, whatever--they will talk you into taking the blame. They'll have you convinced you did it even if you didn't. PLEASE, SHUT UP.

    • Re:If you get arrested and/or get put on trial... (Score:5, Informative)

      by Abreu (173023) on Monday April 28 2008, @08:08PM (#23231692)
      Really kids, listen to this guy.

      I once spent 48hrs in custody and 2 years of going to hearings for not listening to this basic piece of advise.

      I ended up proving myself innocent of what I was being accused of (and the real guilty party, my boss at the time, was never accused).

      So, I learned two valuable lessons after this ordeal:

      1- If you find out that your boss is doing unethical and illegal stuff, quit your job.

      2- If you find yourself being questioned by the police about something, ask first if you are under arrest. If you are, don't say a word to the cops until you get your lawyer to speak for you.

    • Re:If you get arrested and/or get put on trial... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by gd23ka (324741) on Monday April 28 2008, @08:10PM (#23231722) Homepage
      I'll second that. I wish I could mod your post up all the way to +10 and change the font color to yellow on black.

      What you describe is entirely correct. When an officer starts asking you questions if you know what's good for you UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES ANSWER any questions or volunteer any information. Instead and again like you said: Ask "Officer am I under arrest?". If you're not then leave. If you are, tell them "Officer I am invoking my right to remain silent". They will threaten that remaining silent only makes things worse. In many cases they will threaten with arrest if you remain silent or they will offer to help you if you admit to the charge. A POLICE OFFICER HAS NO INFLUENCE ON CRIMINAL PROCEEDINGS OTHER AS A WITNESS. A police officer can not reduce your charges, a police officer can NOT drop charges. But... they are permitted to lie to you in order to obtain incriminatory information. They are permitted to offer false legal advice if it serves the prosecution(!).

      You can expect some very tense moments with officers when you deny them permission to search your vehicle or your property or if you remain silent. I have been there. Be prepared for pressure but know that in the end it's better to get intense with the Officer than with your future cell mates (not that I have been there ;-) )

  • Summary of the evidence (Score:5, Informative)

    by slashqwerty (1099091) on Monday April 28 2008, @07:42PM (#23231328)
    Summary of evidence:

    1. Reiser showed up at his childrens' school the day after Labor day, the first school day after Nina disappeared and a day when Nina was supposed to pick up the kids. The prosecuter claims he was making sure the police didn't show up to ask where the kids' mother was. Reiser claims he went there to add his mother, Beverly Palmer, to the list of people that could pick up the kids. He was scheduled to pick up the kids the next day.

    2. Hans' Honda CRX was missing the front passenger seat. It went missing sometime after he got a speeding ticket (after Nina disappeared) and before the police seized the vehicle.

    3. Hans admits his hosed out the inside of the car. He removed the seat and threw it away. He also removed the carpet and disposed of it.

    4. The car was also missing a piece of trim that Hans admits to throwing out.

    5. Han's admits he was trying to hide the car from the police.

    6. Nina's van was found three miles from Hans' home. Her cell phone was found in the van with the battery removed.

    7. When Hans was taken into custody his cell phone did not have a battery in it. On the stand he claimed that he did not remove the battery from his own phone. He later admitted he lied about that. He actually removed it frequently after Nina disappeared.

    8. Along with his cell phone, Hans was carrying his passport and several thousand dollars in cash.

    9. Reiser was seen hosing down the driveway to his mother's home shortly after Nina disappeared.

    10. The police found two books on murder in Reiser's car. He had purchased them with cash shortly after Nina disappeared.

    11. He paid a $5,000 retainer to a criminal defense attorney just days after Nina disappeared, while the investigation was still a missing person's case. He didn't even bother to try calling her to find out if she was alive before he shelled out for the retainer.

    My personal opinion is that Hans killed Nina in a fit of rage, then scrambled to cover up the evidence. I did not see any evidence whatsoever of premeditation. So I can not at all understand how this jury reached a verdict of First degree murder.

  • Yes, I knew Hans and Nina (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 28 2008, @07:51PM (#23231464)
    I live in North Oakland and knew Hans Reiser from the Berkeley OCF.

    I met Nina Reiser at a pre-school picnic.

    Nina seemed like a typical harried mom - devoted to her kids and quite kind (she got a cup of juice for my daughter).

    Hans, on the other hand, went out of his way to be mean, petty, arrogant, and small minded. He acted as if he owned the Open Computer Facility, and that everyone should kow-tow to him. Once he booted an undergrad off the system because she had posted a Usenet message that he disagreed with.

    I attended the trial for several days. I was impressed with how carefully the jurors followed the witnesses, even though the testimony was boring.

    Hans shot himself in the foot by testifying. Maybe he shot both feet. He used the passive voice when describing critical events, as if he were an outside observer. He varied from extremely explicit (remembering license plates) to utterly vague (not remembering where he slept).

    Even though I wanted him to get out of this squeeze, I quite agree with the jurors on this one: there may not be a body, but Hans committed murder.

    • Re:So... (Score:5, Informative)

      by darkmeridian (119044) <(moc.liamg) (ta) (gnauhc.mailliw)> on Monday April 28 2008, @07:39PM (#23231290) Homepage Journal
      The prosecutor was also able to exclude the testimony of a guy called Sturgeon, who admitted to killing at least eight people and was having an affair with Hans Reiser's wife. If his testimony were allowed, it'd be the battle of the two weirdos and Hans, being the guy in a murder case who hasn't admitted to murdering, probably would have came out on top.

      • Re:Doubt disappeared when Hans testified (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Chris Burke (6130) on Monday April 28 2008, @08:09PM (#23231696) Homepage
        Yes, exactly, the problem was that Reiser eliminated doubt. All that was left was the simple question: Was his testimony credible? Well, based solely on the few snippets in the article, it doesn't sound credible at all. Sitting through 11 days of that, and I can see being completely convinced he was lying his ass off. And that's being me, knowing full well how weird, paranoid, and asocial geeks can be.

        The thing is, that while there was only circumstantial evidence, there was rather a lot of it. That amount of evidence is used to convict people plenty often. You don't have to have a body, a gun with fingerprints on it, and ballistics that match the bullet in the body. "Circumstantial" blood stains require either a lot of good explaining, or a lot of shutting up and leaving room for the "reasonable doubt" that your lawyer will certainly argue for. When you try to explain it away, and your explanations sound hollow, then that only leaves the interpretation that you are lying because the circumstantial evidence is real evidence.

        There's a good lesson here: Listen to your lawyer. If your lawyer says it would be a bad idea for you to testify, it's probably because they know what they are talking about. It's very much a geek thing to want to address every point made by your opponent directly, to leave nothing left unaccounted for. Except that when your rebuttals are weak, you can actually have the opposite effect. Let your lawyer figure out when that is appropriate.

    • Oblig ReiserFS Joke (Score:5, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 28 2008, @07:42PM (#23231332)
      It's written in his journal!

    • Re:US jury system does it again (Score:5, Funny)

      by Tackhead (54550) on Monday April 28 2008, @07:42PM (#23231334)

      Oh well, maybe Hans will confess and reveal where he stashed the body now.

      Probably a blob, or maybe split under a well-balanced grove of trees. Even if he can't use the journal to recover the data, he should at least be able to get the last-modified date, right?

      (Why does it smell of sulfur all of a sudden, and what am I doing in this handbasket?)

    • Re:US jury system does it again (Score:5, Insightful)

      by OMNIpotusCOM (1230884) * on Monday April 28 2008, @07:43PM (#23231344) Homepage Journal
      I'm sorry, but that's ridiculous. Last I knew you had to prove that he planned to kill someone with a first degree murder charge. If you can't prove she's dead, and nobody saw her die, and there's no evidence that she's anywhere other than where he says, you can't convict a person of first degree murder.

      Can you imagine what would happen if this guy was black?

    • Re:US jury system does it again (Score:5, Interesting)

      by softwaredoug (1075439) on Monday April 28 2008, @07:46PM (#23231394)
      From the article: "When police eventually located Hans Reiser's Honda CRX a few miles from his home, they found the interior waterlogged, the passenger seat missing, and two books on police murder investigations inside. They also found a sleeping-bag cover stained with a 6-inch wide blotch of Nina's dried blood. " That plus his behavior is pretty damn near close to passing the reasonable doubt criteria. A 6-inch wide blotch is a pretty large one, I might add, not a simple cut.

      • Re:US jury system does it again (Score:5, Insightful)

        by OMNIpotusCOM (1230884) * on Monday April 28 2008, @07:55PM (#23231512) Homepage Journal
        In my truck you'll find a copy of the Satanic Bible, 1984, and Catcher in the Rye (Harry Potter too, but that's because I'm reading it to my son). Not only that but there's a fairly large spot of my friend's blood that I can't get out from when he stepped on a nail and it went through his shoe, and the passenger lock has fallen off (almost as if someone was trying to hastily escape from my truck). I keep a sleeping bag and blanket in my truck - it's Iowa, what're you gonna do in a blizzard? I'm a loner with a quirky sense of humor.

        I think we've just proved that I can be convicted of first degree murder if my friend turns up missing.
        • Not if you know when to shut up.

        • Re:US jury system does it again (Score:5, Insightful)

          by Mike Buddha (10734) on Monday April 28 2008, @08:10PM (#23231724)

          I think we've just proved that I can be convicted of first degree murder if my friend turns up missing.
          Well, actually, I'm pretty sure you'd have to kill him first. And you'd have to rip out one of the seats of your truck, hose down the inside of the truck leaving an inch of water, and claim that you removed the seat in order to sleep in the car, in the inch of water. And they'd have to find your friends blood in your house as well. And your friend would have had to disappear with you as the last person to see him alive. And you'd have to testify in your own defense, and do a piss poor job of convincing the jury that you're telling the truth.

          Yeah that'd do it, genius.

        • Re:US jury system does it again (Score:5, Funny)

          by uniquename72 (1169497) on Monday April 28 2008, @08:16PM (#23231804)

          In my truck you'll find a copy of the Satanic Bible, 1984, and Catcher in the Rye (Harry Potter too, but that's because I'm reading it to my son).
          You're a highschool freshman and you have a son?

          it's Iowa
          Oh, now I get it.
    • No evidence? No body? No murder weapon? Who cares! The prosecutor used Power Point in his closing.. The defendant is "weird".

      Did you bother to RTFA? There was plenty of evidence. A body is not required to arrest and convict somebody of murder. Otherwise all anybody would have to do would be to cremate the body and poof! No crime!

      The article gives just a couple of examples, but they're obviously examples of many. The guy spent 11 full days on the stand. The one pretty incriminating example of evidence cited in the article is the fact that he removed the passenger seat of his car just after his wife's disappearance, then hosed down the interior and left an inch of standing water on the floor boards. Now, you tell me why any average person has reason to do that. I can tell you that in 20 years of car ownership and six different cars, I have never once taken the passenger seat out of my car, thrown it away and then hosed down the interior, and I don't know anyone else who has either. His explanation was that he liked to sleep in the car and wanted the extra room. Does this sound plausible to you?

      So, let's just look at this *one* piece of evidence. Guy's wife disappears. He then immediately removes the seat from his car, which is never seen again, and he hoses down the interior of the car. That doesn't paint a picture for you? Now, let's say you ask the guy why he did that and he gives you a laughably ridiculous explanation. And let's say this goes on for 11 days as the prosecution asks him to explain every other piece of evidence, and his explanations are no less ridiculous in each case.

      The standard for guilt or innocence is proof beyond a reasonable doubt. That doesn't mean *any* doubt, and that's the mistake people often make. It's *reasonable* doubt. Is it reasonable to assume he was telling the truth about that car seat? Would any reasonable person do what he did with that car seat? And if all his other explanations about the evidence presented were similar, is it reasonable to assume he was telling the truth about anything?

      • Re:Reasonable doubt? (Score:5, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 28 2008, @07:46PM (#23231386)
        >Too bad ReiserFS will probably die
        I'm guessing it will disappear in the middle of the night, never to be heard from again. Police will arrest the xfs maintainer on chargest, the evidence being that neighbors saw him carry out what could have been a backup tape wrapped in a roll of carpet in the middle of the night.

    • Re:Reasonable Doubt (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Wrath0fb0b (302444) on Monday April 28 2008, @07:56PM (#23231520)

      I have to be absolutely certain that there can't be any other reasonable explanation of what happened. [SNIP] What happened to the good old "we'd rather have ten guilty men run free than put one innocent man in jail"?
      Sorry, those two statements do not compute. The preference for acquitting N guilty men rather than convicting one innocent implies (for finite values of N) that absolute certainty cannot be required. Absolute certainty implies infinite N. There is no possible way to convict anyone (confessions with corroboration aside) certainly without introducing error. The best we can do is attempt to construct a system that is as fair as possible while still rendering decisions in a finite amount of time (justice delayed and so forth) for a finite amount of resource. Clearly we aren't there yet (not by a long shot) but the only way to make progress is to acknowledge that human decision making processes are flawed and work around it. A system that categorically does not convict the innocent is one that does not convict anyone at all.

      For an interesting review of historical views on 'N' (and Blackstone's criteria in general), see http://www.law.ucla.edu/volokh/guilty.htm [ucla.edu].

      • Re:Reasonable Doubt (Score:5, Interesting)

        by SashaMan (263632) on Monday April 28 2008, @08:09PM (#23231706)
        Mod parent up. I recently was called for jury duty and was directly asked the question "Do you agree with the statement that is it better to have five guilty men go free then put one innocent man in jail?" by the defense attorney. I think my response was something like "of course," and I remember being shocked that a significant number of potential jurors did not agree. Afterwards, though, I realized that the question really breaks down to "what's an acceptable false positive rate?" 1 in 10? 1 in 100? It made me realize the situation is not as clear cut as I originally thought. Sure, I can barely imagine the horror of being an innocent man in prison, but the fact is that you do need to accept some error rate to live in a lawful society.

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