Hans Reiser Guilty of First Degree Murder
blog.wired.com
blog.wired.com
I, of course, have no idea if he committed the crime, but I find his bizarre explanations far more believable than the jury. He really is just that kind of person...a bit paranoid, extremely analytical, and significantly smarter than the vast majority of people. This is true even among extremely smart folks, like those on the Linux kernel mailing list, he's probably among the smartest in the conversation. But he's also lacking in many social skills to the point that his involvement in a discussion usually hurts more than helps--reading his numerous arguments on the LKML is like seeing a warm up for his bizarre performance on the stand.
So, one could make the case that Hans' feeling of superiority, which might be hard to avoid for someone as smart as he is, and his paranoia combined to produce this very result. Perhaps he figured he'd get away with it, because he's so much smarter than everyone else. And perhaps his paranoia convinced him that Nina had plans to steal away with his children and he'd never see them again (there is some evidence that this was actually her plan). Since the average American has a rather deeply ingrained mistrust of really smart people, his particularly ornery and superior attitude certainly didn't help him.
I genuinely like Hans, and think very highly of him as a developer...so I'm not going to spend a lot of time dwelling on the uncomfortable thoughts of whether he committed the crime or not. I'll just hope that if he did, he gets some help for his mental illness while imprisoned (I'm assuming that if he did it, it's due to his paranoia being far worse than is apparent in his public persona), and that he's able to accept responsibility for the act. And, if he didn't do it, I hope that something comes out that exonerates him before he's too old to enjoy a return to freedom.
That's not that hard. Criminals are notoriously really dumb. And lazy.
I hope you're not speaking from experience; otherwise, I hope you don't know where I live...
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/04/29/...
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.
But, yes, it's clear that him taking the stand was the worst possible thing he could do and he apparently fought loudly and repeatedly with his lawyer over this decision.
I'm surprised he went down for murder 1, but there was a pretty damning array of things lined up against him. Aspergers or not, he admittedly ripped up and flooded his car while trying to actively hide it from the police in a storage locker; he claimed a 6-inch(!)-wide blood stain on a bag (not a sleeping bag, but its pouch) in that car was from having sex; and finally, he built his case not on the premise that he didn't kill Nina, but that she was still alive --- a very simple assertion for the DA to knock down.
There's nothing wrong with circumstantial evidence. It's used all the time. The ambiguity you're having trouble coping with is the reason we have juries and strict rules regarding admissability.
In this case, one could argue as follows:
Nina disappears, and one or more friends help her get to Russia incognito (go through Mexico, perhaps).
Children go into custody of her parents who take them back to Russia.
Meanwhile, Hans is the first suspect, as is always the case in murder cases where there is a spouse or former spouse with some plausible motive and no good alibi...he is known to be paranoid by anyone that knows him, so begins to behave erratically when police begin to pay attention to him.
Perhaps someone (maybe Nina, maybe the serial killer friend, maybe someone else) had sprinkled a little blood on the front seat of his car (and in his house and the sleeping bag). He panics when he sees it and rips the seat out and disposes of it. Since he didn't commit the crime in this scenario he wouldn't have even known about the blood in the sleeping bag or the house.
Since producing some blood is pretty trivial, it means that anyone with the means and willingness to disappear could frame anyone for murder.
There is a reason why murder cases without a body or murder weapon pretty rarely result in conviction. And, I suspect, had Hans taken his lawyer's advice and not taken the stand, he would have probably had a much better chance, even with the pretty strong circumstantial evidence.
I'm not saying Hans didn't do it...I don't know. But I know that circumstantial evidence should be viewed with suspicion, when 25 years of someones life is on the line. The jury system is intended to insure that no innocent man is ever convicted, and this principle is even more important than every guilty man being punished.
You don't, if you're a philosopher. But the rule is beyond reasonable doubt, not beyond all conceivable doubt.
The reason to disbelieve the "elaborate framing" hypothesis is straightforward: It's really easy to prove, and yet it has not been proved. All you have to do to prove it is find Nina. And yet she has not been found.
In fiction you can make a character disappear by saying "they moved to Russia/Argentina/Outer Mongolia and disappeared". In the real world it really is harder than that. Russia is not on the moon. You can phone up some Russians right now if you want and have a chat. Even if the Russian government won't cooperate with an investigation, there must be private investigators in Russia. All Hans and his legal team have to do is hire a P.I. to stake out the kids and produce some evidence that they're being visited by a mystery woman who might be Nina and suddenly his case becomes a lot stronger. He could still do this now, from prison, if he wanted. Might really shorten that 25 year sentence.
I suppose you could argue that Nina is so sneaky and so well connected that she and her kids have truly vanished from mortal ken, like Osama bin Laden. I haven't followed the case, so I don't know if Reiser tried to argue that. If he did, it obviously didn't work.
And I suppose you could argue that the woman hates Hans so much that she's willing to be separated from her kids for 30 years (or forever, via suicide -- there's a Sherlock Holmes plot for you) just to maximize his suffering. Good luck selling that "reasonable" theory.
The jury system is intended to insure that no innocent man is ever convicted...
Um, no. That jury system would be called "never sentence anyone". This system aspires to spare the innocent, but there is never a guarantee. And I have to say that, in the annals of potential injustice, this is a pretty weak example. Literally thousands of innocent-but-convicted Americans would be free today if they had even half of the legal resources that Reiser hired and then apparently chose to ignore.
Imagine what the result is if we're wrong about Hans. He is an extraordinarily smart person, a valuable member of society, and could have made significant accomplishments in the next 25 years with his intelligence and experience. If we're wrong then we're throwing away his future contributions to society, depriving people that he would have helped of his assistance, stealing him from his friends, and in general not allowing him to have a positive effect on anyone's life for the next 25 years. Admittedly, in the grand scheme of things, that isn't too horrible, but it would certainly be horrible for the people that he would have had a good effect on. Perhaps he would have inspired some child to go on and do great things. We can't know.
Based on that, if a person is to be imprisoned for a huge portion of his life then there should be no doubt about his guilt.
It's true that it's impossibly unlikely that Nina made herself vanish, but consider that someone else could have used her to frame him.
It's 25 years of a smart man's life. Let's at least be 100% positive about his guilt.
People are routinely convicted of murder on indirect evidence. Evidence is evidence. It's up to the jury to decide how compelling the evidence is. I'm surprised they came back with murder 1, but would have been shocked if they had acquitted: there was a lot of circumstancial evidence.
Evidence is hard if we are 100% positive about its accuracy.
When are we ever 100% positive?
When our decision is based on current technology that we've used to rigorously prove something.
"Smart man's life"? You really think we should have different standards for programmers?
Those are your words, not mine. It would be silly to have different standards based on an artificial rating of a person.
But we should have different standards that reflect the possibility that we're wrong. For example, by limiting prison terms to an absolute maximum of ten years unless we are 100% positive (as defined above) that the person is guilty.
There are proportionally few people who are murderously inclined. It's worth risking them if it means that no innocents are convicted. Perfect murders are unlikely, and they become more unlikely as forensic technology improves. It's best for a prison sentence to be based on a proof, but if we can't be positive about a person's guilt then we should favor the possibility of innocence.
At the risk of repeating myself: Yes, you'd be right to complain if Reiser were being sentenced to death, but he isn't. And it would be sad if Reiser spent 25 or 30 years in prison even though he was innocent... but that might not happen, because at any moment Nina could turn up, dead or alive, and exonerate him.
[EDIT: removed bogus argument I made based on misreading the original article. I promise to get more sleep before my next post. :]
Let me politely decline to explore this complex issue of justice, policing, and ethics -- one which probably should be decided case-by-case rather than by a one-size-fits-all rule -- and just point out that accepting patches from an apparently-insane convicted murderer is really, really bad P.R. for your open source project.
Touche.
I wouldn't be so sure...
Curiously, the Oxford English Dictionary didn't have problems accepting contributions from their apparently-insane murderer:
(That would be a funny steampunk novel.)
But, yes, this is the guy I had in mind when I said that you have to consider the question on a case-by-case basis.
>>> Would it be so horrible to give him a laptop and some internet access and let him hack?
Yes it would. The only hacking he'll be doing is with a shiv.
But, prisoners generally are encouraged to work as part of their rehabilitation, and it seems to me that if his skills are most useful to the public in the development of software.
Nobody said he's Albert Einstein or Jimmy Carter. Just that he's done useful work for society--millions of people use ReiserFS, and he's worked for the US government for many years doing cryptographic and plugin-capable filesystem work--and that he could continue to do useful work for society with a few minor modifications to the terms of his imprisonment.
If you think Open Source software on the scale that Hans was involved in it has no value to society, then we'll have to agree to disagree.
Giving prisoners real-time access to broadband communication is fraught with complications. Giving them a computer with no network is not especially different from giving them books and letting them read and write paper mail -- which I support, of course.
I really don't like this line of argument, because it implies that if he were not an extraordinarily smart person, a valuable member of society, without significant accomplishments, then he should be convicted. If it were a homeless divorced guy living out of his minivan, should he have been convicted? How about a blue-collar landscaper? An unemployed househusband?
A society's standards of justice say far more about the society than they do about the people who go on trial before them. We have laws instead of kings because there's this wonderful innovation called "equal before the law". We owe a lot of Western civilization to that.
The part I find disturbing is that he was essentially convicted because the jury didn't like him. I know this happens all the time - this is why lawyers have you wear a suit in court, and why they agonize over whether you should testify or not, and why they coach you on what to say on the stand, and why they have closing arguments. But it's usually not quite so overt. He made an ass out of himself at his own trial - I'd like to believe that it shouldn't matter when "justice is blind", but of course it does, and that's why he's going to jail.
I think that if Reiser had shut up and not testified, he'd have gotten manslaughter. It seems clear that his demeanor amped his conviction up to murder. But the jury didn't do that on a whim: Reiser managed to portrary himself as deceptive, evasive, and utterly unconcerned over the welfare of his family. That got factored in. How could it not?
I was trying to enumerate the good qualities of Hans. If it were someone else, I would have listed their positive qualities. I didn't mean to imply that they should affect the verdict, but meant to communicate "if we're wrong about Hans, the following value is lost: an extremely smart person, ..."
I didn't say there is such a guarantee...just that our system is supposed to protect the innocent from conviction even if it means the guilty occasionally go free (at least many of our founding fathers felt that this was the purpose of our jury system). If you don't believe that is the correct way for our legal system to operate, we'll have to agree to disagree. I think it is more important for the courts to first do no evil than to always get vengeance for crimes committed (even if it's sometimes taken against an innocent party).
Anyway, I'm not saying I believe Hans is innocent, and I've also stated above that the circumstantial evidence is pretty overwhelming. But, I am saying that one should be cautious with purely circumstantial evidence, and that I would find it hard to convict someone if I were on a jury in a trial with only circumstantial evidence.
"Literally thousands of innocent-but-convicted Americans would be free today if they had even half of the legal resources that Reiser hired and then apparently chose to ignore."
That's a completely different discussion, and I agree with your statement entirely, though I'm getting the impression that you consider it far less of a problem than I do.
And so would I. But neither you nor I are on the jury, and so we don't know the full extent of the evidence.
I'm getting the impression that you consider it far less of a problem than I do.
Well, that impression is probably mistaken, unless what you're saying is that there's no amount of circumstantial evidence that should send a guy to prison. If all we're arguing about is the degree of the evidence... that's why we have juries.
I will say that my opinion would be closer to yours if Reiser were in danger of being sentenced to death. I disbelieve in the death penalty for precisely the reasons you describe. As it is, if Reiser isn't a murderer, there's a very good chance that he won't spend 25 years in prison -- Nina could turn up alive, or turn up dead in circumstances that exonerate Reiser. This isn't his last chance. Unless he's guilty.
I find it ridiculous that the DA would have chosen to pursue a case against a lonely computer programmer instead of locking up a serial killer. You have to believe something pretty incredible to argue that Sturgeon was a real factor in this case.
The problem is that a judge must interpret a guilty verdict as an immutable fact, rather than as a decision made by emotional and fundamentally random human beings:
if conviction == guilty
decide a sentence based on the type of crime
You are obviously not as confident as the jury was. But you were not on the jury. The jury, given the facts of the case, appears to have been maximally confident about Reiser's culpability: they returned a verdict of premeditated malicious intentional murder, where they instead could have found that Reiser had accidentally killed Nina in the heat of a terrible argument.
At a certain point, you just have to let go of the fact that you disagree with the jury. Clearly, we cannot simply poll every person on the country as to what they thought of the case from afar.
That's a bad idea: if we accuse someone of some awful crime, and decide there's only 1/10 confidence in a guilty verdict, they should still serve a small fraction of the time? Someone's either guilty or not. If they are, there are sentencing guidelines that take various other factors into account.
An elaborate framing story is hard to believe as it is easy for a woman in California to get a divorce and custody of her children.
On the other hand, OJ got off his criminal charges scott free, and later went on to write a book about his murder technique. The jury system isn't infallible.
I don't necessarily have a problem with circumstantial evidence, I just think that this is a very harsh sentence when there is no real evidence that anyone was killed.
It would be pretty rough in 10 years if some other evidence turns up and his life is wasted.
There is also the children who are obviously victims in some sense as well, this must be horrible for them.
I thought for a conviction there had to be no shadow of doubt? There are shadows here.
Speaking of which, isn't it time to add Paul Graham to the programming language creator or serial killer game?
http://www.comicvine.com/buu/41116/costumes/&c=8591
I don't see the similarity.
The reasonable explanation here is that the evidence available to both the prosecution and the defense suggests that Sturgeon is simply a nutcase telling stories.
Here I was hoping he didn't do it...
I hope it doesn't reflect poorly on the open source community. Next thing you know they will be calling us murderers.
We still don't know if he did.
In this case, 12 people of the jury thought he did it. Since I wasn't in the trial, and didn't see the evidence, I have no recourse but to believe that there was reason enough to convict him. This was not a racially charged situation, so it is hard to argue that the jury was biased, or anything like that.
"Hora speculated that Reiser might have choked his wife, based on little evidence except that Reiser was a black belt in judo, a martial art where choking is a specialty."
Judo, meaning "gentle way", is apparently the martial art that teaches you how to kill your wife.
Of all martial arts, Judo is one of the gentlest. I can hardly imagine using it to kill someone who does not really want to get killed.
As for Mr. Sturgeon, misreporting a crime, specially if it's done with the intention of compromising a murder investigation, is a serious offense. I am not sure why the police didn't get him.
And, while we are at it, it is a real no-no do screw your friend's wife.
This case begs for an appeal.
Still, this is a lot of speculation and if he strangled her, where did the blood come from? I think that it is quite likely that he killed her, but not with a choke-hold.