Hans Reiser To Reveal Location of Wife's Body

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.'"

Re:*sigh*

[OzRoy]

Hans Geiger was a Nazi and betrayed his Jewish Collegues.

Heisenberg also worked for the Nazi's and attempted to build a Nuclear bomb. That one however is debatable. He later claimed he was secretly sabotaging the project.

I think what will have to happen is ReiserFS will need to change its name. Once they do that then ithey will be able to move the project forward.

Re:Am I missing something or

[gronofer]

did the article just speculate?

Seems so to me. There's no indication here that Reiser has been involved in the discussions. To say "all doubt has been quelled" is premature, since nothing new has been added.

Re:*sigh*

[elrous0]

Don't forget Werner Von Braun. He used slave labor to build the V2, was an SS officer, etc. But, without his help after the war, the U.S. probably would have never gotten to the moon.

Re:*sigh*

[afxgrin]

Albert Einstein didn't name his theories after himself.

But after reading the article, the summary is highly deceptive. The article basically says that Hans needs to reveal the location of the body if he wants a reduced sentence.

It doesn't say he will. The judge is just assuming that Hans will do that to reduce the sentence.

Re:fuck

[afxgrin]

The summary is deceiving dude. The judge just speculates he's going to reveal the location for a reduction of sentence.

There's seriously nothing saying Hans even knows where it is.

Re:*sigh*

[MrMr]

Well. he seemed to think we might, as Einstein himself said: ( http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein [wikiquote.org] )
By an application of the theory of relativity to the taste of readers, today in Germany I am called a German man of science, and in England I am represented as a Swiss Jew. If I come to be represented as a bête noire, the descriptions will be reversed, and I shall become a Swiss Jew for the Germans and a German man of science for the English! (To The Times (London), November 28, 1919, quoted in The New Quotable Einstein by Alice Calaprice, 2005, ISBN 0-691-12075-7)

Re:this reminds me of oj simpson

[samkass]

Everyone should be assumed innocent... by the justice system and the jury. I'm allowed to think whatever I want as a private citizen.

Re:Am I missing something or

[burris]

I would overlook that for the present considering that the US still practices capital punishment and Reiser could very well face death if convicted of 1st degree murder.

Hans Reiser has already been convicted of 1st degree murder. He won't be facing the death penalty because in California they only give that out for 1st degree murder "with special circumstances" such as multiple murders or laying in wait.

Re:Am I missing something or

[Reality Master 101]

Glad I'm not in the US, getting life in prison for something that has way too many loose ends, just isn't right.

Loose ends? Only if you believe "guilty beyond a reasonable doubt" means "guilty beyond all doubt". I can only assume you haven't actually seen the list of evidence against him.

I told you so

[Zontar_Thing_From_Ve]

Yes, I am going to say "I told you so". I posted in just about all of the Reiser threads that I was sure he killed his wife. Why? I had a fiancee (we did not marry though) in Ukraine a few years ago and I know American men who married women from Ukraine and Russia. One thing that is just a 100% constant with these women is that they are always devoted to their children. The idea that a Russian woman would simply abandon her children is just ludicrous in the extreme. A Russian mother would NEVER abandon her children. When Reiser claimed she had done this, I knew he killed her. Since 99% or more of you have never had relationships with women in this part of the world, I can only tell you that they simply do NOT under any circumstances abandon their children. Fathers over there do this all the time, but not mothers.

Another issue is that the women over there are vindictive to an extent that Americans (and probably any man not from there) just cannot comprehend. I found it impossible to believe as well that she would return to Russia simply because any woman I've ever met from that part of the world would instead fight her husband in court just to stick it to him as much as possible. The idea that Nina Reiser would abandon her kids and a possible chance to stick it to Hans in the legal system just to live a footloose life in Russia is impossible to believe for anyone who's had any real experience with these women.

Re:*sigh*

[necama]

I think the proper phrase is "would not have gotten to the moon that quickly." Once it is known that something is possible, then scientists can move rather quickly to reproduce it and make it an engineering task. Working directly with Von Braun simply sped up the process, since we didn't need to reproduce his work first.

Bad Summary!

[Anonymous Coward]

Its almost like the person writing the summary didn't even read the article, but then the article itself has a badly written headline. The D.A. said that Reiser *might* disclose the location of the body for a reduced sentence. So this is nothing more than speculation at this point.

Re:I told you so

[Anonymous Coward]

...except that her children went back to Russia to live with grandma. So if she's there too, she didn't "abandon" them.

Re:Am I missing something or

[Splab]

But they weren't cold hearted, they where ignorant.

Problem is in the US being ignorant is not a defense and thus the deed carries a minimum sentence of umpteen years. Over here ignorance still isn't an excuse it will however allow the judges to levy a punishment better fitting the crime.

Also remember society based on revenge will just spiral out of control - who executes the executioner?

RTFA

[macdaddy]

You should RTFA. It doesn't say that he's confessed. Yet, at least. And it doesn't say that's he's offered to lead the DA to the body. Clearly the Wired reporter that wrote the story is used to writing technical articles, not articles about murder and the legal system.

Re:Am I missing something or

[Atlantis-Rising]

I ask you to do nothing except think through your argument, and then take it to the logical conclusion.

Are you sure that's an argument you really want to make?

Re:*sigh*

[MightyYar]

we did discard the results of their horrific experiments on human beings.

Not according to Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]:

Modern ethical issues

The modern body of medical knowledge about how the human body reacts to freezing to the point of death is based almost exclusively on these Nazi experiments. This, together with the recent use of data from Nazi research into the effects of phosgene gas, has proved controversial and presents an ethical dilemma for modern physicians who do not agree with the methods used to obtain this data.[17] Similarly, controversy has arisen from the use of results of biological warfare testing done by the Imperial Japanese Army's Unit 731.[29] However, the results from Unit 731 were kept classified by the United States and the majority of doctors involved were given pardons.[30]

Care for a bath ?

[DrSkwid]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_George_Haigh [wikipedia.org]

Re:Who said Reiser doesn't support robust recovery

[Ioldanach]

I can't think of any language or system offhand in which NULL implies zero. What are you referring to?

NULL, zero, NaN, and undef are all distinct constructs which are not completely interchangable, though some computing languages allow you to interchange some of them.

As far as I'm aware:

• zero is a value, none. None is not the same as nothing.
• NaN is a theoretical value, there's a value out there but because the conditions that got you to this point in the calculation are the result of taking an unknown to an unknown level, you can't define what it is, let alone that it is a number.
• NULL is valueless, empty, nothing. It might be used in the context of a null set, in which case the set is empty, but this isn't the same as a set which contains a single entry that is a zero, it is simply outright empty. If you ask if 0 == 0, the result is true, if you ask if NULL == 0, the answer is false, because the NULL is nothingness. If you ask if NULL == NULL, the answer is still false, because neither value can match anything.
• undef is a placeholder of something that will probably get a value at some point, but currently doesn't have one. Until it does, its value can probably be considered NULL.

Re:this reminds me of oj simpson

[Alomex]

Name ONE piece of evidence that is "undisputed fact" that it was planted. Just one.

There's plenty: the blood on the sock that had (i) police anticoagulant on it and (ii) left the exact mark and shape of an essay tube being applied against a folded sock.

The blood on the ford bronco, which was so clearly planted the prosecutors did not even mention in the trial, and the list goes on and on.

but you seriously have to turn off your brain to think OJ was innocent

What was I saying about people divided by color refusing to listen to each other? If you read my posting again you'll see that it claims he's clearly guilty. You seem to miss the fact that it is perfectly possible to be guilty and have evidence planted on you. Lazy policemen do that all the time to shorten the investigation time. In this case they got caught, that is the only difference.

But they did themselves no favors by embracing OJ.

Oh, I agree. By the same token whites did themselves no favors by refusing to acknowledge that the LAPD is a corrupt and racist police department that got caught planting evidence on a black person, which in this particular case happened to be both famous and guilty.

In other words, black people need to take responsibility for their part in perpetuating racism.

How about you: are you willing to take responsibility for your part in tolerating racism within the LAPD, which has been repeatedly caught planting evidence and doing other racist actions?

Re:C and C++, ever heard of em?

[ZorbaTHut]

Curiously, in C++, that definition would be invalid, even if the underlying implementation of NULL was in fact not 0.

C++ has several rather odd requirements for NULL that basically come down to the following:

NULL is defined as 0, no discussion.
0, as a constant, has special behavior allowing it to be implicitly cast to any pointer type, where it will be a "NULL value" that is distinct from any valid pointer, but is not guaranteed to take any particular bit pattern.
Testing a pointer in a conditional, or casting it to bool implicitly or explicitly, results in true if the pointer is not a "NULL value" or false if it is.

The end result is that you can end up treating 0 as NULL, and treating a null pointer as 0, right up until you decide to muck about with direct memory access, at which point that all goes out the window.

Essentially, int *x = NULL; if(x) fail(); is guaranteed to not fail, while int *x = NULL; int y; memcpy(&y, &x, sizeof(y)); if(y) fail(); is not guaranteed to not fail (even if x and y are the same size.) Also, NULL == 0 is always true, and int *x = NULL; x == 0 is also always true.

As I understand it, C doesn't pin things down quite this firmly, but in the end it gives some of the same guarantees. I suspect that definition of NULL isn't technically conforming to the C language spec, though I wouldn't bet money on it - I don't know C minutiae as well as I do C++.

Now you know more about NULL in C++ than you ever really wanted to. :D

Re:juror comp

[Migraineman]

Wow, the last time I went for jury duty (US, DC metro area, 2006) we got $15 per day compensation. Period. No meals, transportation, or parking expenses. I was there for about 6 hours, so the state values my time at less than $2.50 per hour. I understand exactly why folks in the US don't want to participate in jury duty.

Here's an example from Baltimore County, Maryland. [baltimorecountymd.gov]

On a daily basis, the Circuit Court for Baltimore County compensates each juror $15 plus provides validated parking in a County garage. If you are empanelled on a petit jury for more than five days, starting on Day # 6, your compensation will increase to $50 per day. Maryland law does not state that your employer has to pay you while you serve as a juror; however, the court will provide you with certification of attendance.

Re:juror comp

[Migraineman]

That's actually a very reasonably policy. "We expect your undivided attention in this legal matter. We'll value your time accordingly."

The last jury selection I attended, everyone in the room was concerned about being chosen for the multi-week domestic abuse case. Several single-parents tried to be excused, but all were denied because covering for their kids was considered "an inconvenience" and not a necessity. I saw exactly one person be excused from jury duty prior to the selection process - an elderly woman on oxygen and taking hallucinogenic meds. If you're not doped-up and can fog a mirror, you qualify for jury duty in the States.

I did a little searching, and Maryland is par for the course [ct.gov] on jury comp. The data is a little stale, but it's representative. Your employer can't legally fire you while you're on jury duty, but he can force you to burn all your leave and then take a leave-of-absence (i.e. no pay.) $15 per day won't cover beans. Minimum wage in the US is currently $5.85/hr, moving up to $6.55/hr in July. $15 is about 2.5 hours of minimum-wage labor. A full-time minimum-wage employee is earning $46.80/day. Basically, regardless of your employment status, jury duty in the States is "punishment."