My interview with murderer Hans Reiser

I gotta say it: the guy was a f-cking murderer and yet you guys are arguing about whether he got a fair trial, even after he led the cops to the strangled, decomposing corpse. And then complaining about the sheer brass neck of a journo who fails to show appropriate respect to this f-cking murderer. What, just because he hacked on Linux once upon a time? Jeez, you really couldn't make this stuff up.

"Everything Hans said reinforced the image I already had of him. He wasn't interested in what was true, only in whether or not he had been treated fairly."

I think that being treated fairly is a pretty important point. It's pretty obvious now that he was guilty; but, from what I've read, at the time of the trial the prosecution didn't come close to meeting their burden.

I would prefer to have a system where everyone is treated fairly, and some guilty men go free.

Robert Nozick raised an interesting question about this problem. Any system of determining guilt has some false positive rate (let's call it X). You can trivially cut X in half by flipping a coin after determining a person's guilt and only actually considering them guilty if the coin is heads.

I've always heard that it's better to let 10 guilty men go than let one innocent man go to jail. What about 11? 15? 100? 1000? Assuming we can accurately gauge our current jury system's effectiveness (and we can at least come up with a reasonable lower bound using appeal data), it would be trivial to achieve whatever ratio we desired using a simple RNG. So, what's the magic number (1:10, etc.)? And should we do so?

And yes, the reporter was being a total asshole.

This is journalism so bad it makes me sympathize with Reiser. No, you don't lie to the people you interview, and no, the fact that someone murdered his wife does not make it okay to lie to them, either. And when people "read what was written and their reflection punches them in the face", most of the time it isn't "their reflection" that punches them in the face so much as the journalist's bad work. Which is exactly why every interviewee should ask to see the manuscript before it's published, and if the journalist tells you "it doesn't work that way", don't consent to the interview.

The author Elliott is miserable, negative, hateful, boastful and self-righteous. Don't forget (now there's a patronizing phrase, as if anyone forgets the obvious) that the article is entitled, "MY, MY, MY (not someone else's: MY) Interview with (that god damned) murderer Hans Reiser." The article is about Elliott's feelings, primarily. Who cares? Elliott has the psychological insight of a paramecium.

To be fair, Elliott's hatred of Reiser is a little further up the phylogenetic tree, at least on the invertebrate branch. Other than that, the article doesn't say much about the crime or the trial, about Reiser's marriage to a venal Russian bride, or much of anything else. What we do learn is that Elliott is an opportunist who hung around Reiser's trial, managed to get an interview, and gets miffed because Reiser didn't give him what he wanted. The whole purpose was to give readers enough of a bad taste to purchase his book. Elliott is so unsympathetic, he unintentionally forces the reader's identification with Reiser when he turns his back to Elliott and asks the guard to be returned to his cell.

That journalist is an arrogant and ignorant asshole, he reaches conclusions - that he then states as if they were fact - about Reiser's personality as if he were a trained psychologist/psychiatrist, and as if he has studied and analyzed the subject.

Every bone in my body wants to projectile vomit upon reading that crud.

I find it to be just another case of math envy, the imbecile KNOWS that he could never in a million years achieve 1% of what Reiser has achieved, however Reiser is now a convicted murderer, thus the idiot can now feel better about himself, and hurl contempt and scorn on Reiser.

I also find the general tone of the article to be awful insidious.