Hans Reiser Interview on ABC's 20/20

baegucb_18706 noted that ABCs 20/20 has a lengthy article on the saga of the Hans Reiser murder trial. I'm not sure if this article provided any information that you might not have known if you read the earlier wired interview, but it's still a really strange story.

Is that pic caption right?

[bl8n8r]

"Hans Reiser, left, and his attorney, William Dubois"

I think the pic caption is wrong - isn't that Hans on the right side?

Re:She's in Russia

[Serge_Tomiko]

1) As the article says, he was living out of his car. Strange, but not unheard of - especially for someone who likely has few friends and is of limited financial means. 2) He didn't have a book on how to dispose a body, he had a book on murder investigations. As he was the target of one and didn't have a lot of money, this seems pretty reasonable. I'd probably do the same thing.

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Re:She's in Russia

[DustyShadow]

At least they had a body in the Peterson case.

Re:Doctor and translator?

[Cassini2]

Translators get paid in foreign dollars. Doctors are civil service positions in Russia, so they get paid poorly. A Doctor could moonlight as a translator in Russia, and make more money from translating than from saving people ...

Whoosh!

[A nonymous Coward]

Hint: check the spellings ... carefully ... very carefully ...

What is going on?

[realdodgeman]

What the hell happened to "innocent until proven guilty"? Yes he is an insane motherfucker, yes he bought books about murder trails, but that still doesn't prove anything.

Also, knowing that he is a programmer, he doesn't think like must people do. That makes him look crazy. But it still doesn't prove anything.

The US legal system seems more and more broken, and if he is sentenced to jail without further evidence, it just proves to me what I thought all along.

I am not saying that he is innocent, but I am saying he should be treated like he is until he is proven guilty!

Re:He couldn't get a hotel room?

[tftp]

but $9000 isn't really a lot of money, however weird it is to carry it around with you.

Most people don't run a business. Those who do, however, understand very well that $9K is nothing if even a tiny business can easily burn through $100K/yr. It would be indeed a reasonable pocket money; an airplane ticket to Russia would cost about $2,500 probably, and he planned to fly there. We can debate why he wasn't using his credit cards and bank accounts, but when you are travelling hard, cold cash usually works better. Besides, it is not unreasonable to assume that he was planning to skip some of Russian payroll taxes.

He doesn't speak the language

Many, if not most, Russian programmers can speak English - it's pretty much required in the trade. A translator might be useful when the discussion shifts from technical subjects to financial matters.

a hotshot doctor from a rich family

I wouldn't bet on that. Doctors were dime a dozen in the old USSR, and this was just the time when things got worse in the medical professions. Chances are she has a diploma, but that's about it; she would not be allowed to practice in the USA without jumping through many hoops and basically retraining for the local realities. That's probably why she did not work as a doctor - whe was not eligible.

Turing, Posterchild for Tolerance

[mechsoph]

It's even possible to say Turin did not kill himself, but rather died of insanity.

Turing (most likely) killed himself because he was found guilty of the crime [wikipedia.org] of being a homosexual. He was consequently stripped of his security clearance and given female hormones as a "cure," causing him to grow breasts. A story almost as fucked up as whatever is really going on with Reiser.

Re:Renaissance man, indeed.

[arth1]

Wow. Wotta guy. Let's see, I want to marry an intelligent, highly educated doctor and then turn her into a brood mare who stays in the kitchen making cookies. Yeah, that'll work.

She wasn't a doctor. She was something that lacks a counterpart in the US -- a mix between a paediatrician and obstetrician without an MD's qualifications. This Russian profession doesn't translate to an doctor, but more like a midwife in that they have limited practitioner's privileges in their specific field only.
    Unlike in the US, Russian women/children-practitioners are ill paid with very little status, so it's not like Reiser married someone high on the social scale and brought her down to a lower status level -- rather the opposite. Check out the Russian bride-for-sale services, and you'll be astonished at how many of the girls are "doctors". And, indeed, a Russian dating service is how he met his wife.

(A Russian "doktor", by the way, is a professor with at least a decade's experience -- a level of education way higher than anything in the US, so that title shouldn't be mistaken for a doctor either.)

Re:Good way to screw up your life Reiser

[witte]

Your example reminds me of Einstein's pal, Fritz Haber.

He drove his wife Carla Immerwahr nuts by demanding she be a housewife (like Reiser) while she a chemistry researcher with ambitions, and it was not a happy marriage.
She committed suicide, coincidentally right after Haber introduced gas warfare in WW1 and killed 5000+ allied soldiers at the first front line trial in Ypres.
(Look it up on wikipedia, it's a colorful story.)

Interesting detail : Fritz Haber received a nobel prize for the "Haber" process for production of ammonia.
He also invented zyklon B.

Irony : Haber was of jewish origin.

Re:Renaissance man, indeed.

[Teancum]

On this, you got it wrong. Nina was a doctor with full credentials that she could practice medicine in the USA...at least from an educational point of view. And she did have the equivalent of an M.D. in gynecology and obstetrics.

The reason she didn't practice in the USA was mainly an issue of her trying to pass the medical board tests that are required when any foreign-educated physician tries to practice medicine in the USA. From what I understand, Nina passed all of the knowledge-based sections of the board examination (similar to a medical-type GRE exam or bar exam), but essentially flunked the ethics sections. In short, she was not licensed to practice medicine in the USA, not that she didn't have the knowledge about how to do medical procedures.

Now doesn't that give you something to chew about.... when her largest short coming was trying to understand why you needed to be ethical when practicing medicine? And that isn't relevant to this murder trial?