Hans Reiser To Reveal Location of Wife's Body 882
Posted
by
CmdrTaco
from the dark-days-almost-at-an-end dept.
from the dark-days-almost-at-an-end dept.
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.'"
*sigh* (Score:5, Interesting)
Now he's just going to fess up to the murder.
I guess this marks the end of ReiserFS. I'm sure no one in the Linux community wants to be associated to that piece of work.
Re:*sigh* (Score:5, Interesting)
Am I missing something or (Score:5, Interesting)
No where in the article does it say that he has agreed to it, they are speculating that there might be a reduced sentence if Hans discloses where the body is. Also, he is most likely going to be someone's "slave" once he is in prison, so if he gets 15 or 25 years it is most likely going to be in protected custody (= voluntary solitary confinement) and 15 years alone is going to mess him even up let alone 25 years, either way he is done for.
Glad I'm not in the US, getting life in prison for something that has way too many loose ends, just isn't right.
(On a side note, whats with those extremely long terms in prison? Anyone going in for 25 years will never be able to get back into society - I thought the point of prison was to punish and correct the guilty and get them back into working order. There was a couple who got life in prison for mistreating their child to the point of death (raised her as a vegan) - a British couple got 3 years community service for the same thing)
Re:*sigh* (Score:4, Interesting)
Honestly, I don't see how this invalidates his work. Surely the code didn't drive him to commit murder.
Disclaimer: I use ext3, but I'm sure reiserfs has some merits.
Re:*sigh* (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Am I missing something or (Score:2, Interesting)
That used to be the purpose of prison. But then America decided that that was namby-pamby liberal bullshit and that the purpose of prison was to make the prisoner's life as miserable and awful as possible, even if the end result is someone who can't handle society outside and is likely to become a repeat offender. Really, you'll find it difficult to make the argument with most Americans that prison ought to provide rehabilitation rather than the harshest possible punishment.
As an aside, there's nothing about raising your child as a vegan which necessarily constitutes mistreatment. Being a dipshit about nutritional requirements, though, is a different issue. I know several pairs of vegan parents who have raised their children as vegans, and the kids are quite healthy and normal - the parents are merely educated about properly balancing diets and nutrition for children.
Re:this reminds me of oj simpson (Score:5, Interesting)
Yup. I think that such biases are actually stronger in support of someone for irrational tribal reasons than they are, these days, when it comes to being irrationally against someone who's not in your tribe. Classic examples these days would be the small number of people who poll saying they'd vote against Obama because he's black, compared to the huge number who will (and say they will!) vote for him because he's (to whatever degree) black. The folks who completely tossed their reason out the window over Reiser because he's a fellow nerd really do get a chance to stop and think, now. It's very similar to those that tolerate script kiddies and web site defacers because they feel some kinship to them, despite the fact that if the same kids did something similar in meat space (to their car, with spray paint) they'd get all upset.
It was fair to assume Reiser's innocence until the testimony and his behavior started stacking up.
Re:*sigh* (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:*sigh* (Score:1, Interesting)
It's HIS work. If you blame him for the shit he did, you must also praise him for his good work.
messed up? (Score:2, Interesting)
Like make him so crazy he might kill the mother of his children?
Where is the Corpus Delicti? (Score:5, Interesting)
IANAL, but in all the Perry Mason stories I read, the trial always start with proving Corpus Delicti which, as Perry Mason always explains, is not the body of the victim, but a proof that a crime was committed.
In this case, I wonder: wasn't Reiser committed wrongfully? Because if finding the body could turn the conviction from first degree to second degree murder it clearly means that first degree murder hasn't been proved beyond reasonable doubt. At least, "beyond reasonable doubt" doesn't seem like something that could be dispelled by examining a body that has been hidden for several years.
And what if, after examining the body, evidence is found that death could have had a natural cause, or be a suicide? With that reasonable doubt, would the conviction be reversed?
Finally, the juror mentioned in this article [wired.com] that made his decision based on the accused's eyes really scares me. What if I had been tried? Would a crazy schoolteacher send me to prison for life because he didn't like the look in my eyes? There's so much debate on lie detectors in general, experts cannot agree on which subtle body signals will tell if someone is lying or not. If trained police agents, people with vast experience in interrogation practices, using advanced equipment for evaluating stress, cannot tell for sure if someone is lying or not, how come a fifth-grade schoolteacher is able to tell just by a glance at the eyes?...
I'm not saying Reiser is either guilty or not. But that juror's statements make me hope I never stand trial, not under that system, unless there's at least one honest man [imdb.com] in the jury to restrain the crazy old schoolteachers.
Name change (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:World's Greatest Detective (Score:5, Interesting)
Problem is, he thought he was so smart that that sort of illogic would bamboozle at least 1 of 12 jurors. Let me be the first to say "I told you so!" All you who said he didn't do it, welcome your new "I told you so" overlords.
He's only doing this because the body will eventually be found anyway, in which case, "In Soviet Amerika, body reveals YOU (to be a killer)."
Jurors aren't (usually) stupid.
Re:I told you so (Score:3, Interesting)
I for one am glad that the standard of proof has moved from "innocent until proven guilty" to "innocence doesn't jive with my 100% accurate stereotypes." Well, I suppose back to that. It used to be you could tell the guilt of a person just by looking at them.
Also, having her husband convicted of murder, and her children sent to live with her mother is sticking it to him in a nasty way.
I thought he was guilty when he started attempting to explain why he had hosed off the car, personally.
Re:World's Greatest Detective (Score:3, Interesting)
reiserfsck 3.6.19 (2003 www.namesys.com)
Will read-only check consistency of the filesystem on /
Will put log info to 'stdout'
Do you want to run this program?[N/Yes]:Yes
###########
reiserfsck --check started at Mon Jun 9 16:11:27 2008
###########
Replaying journal..
No transactions found
Checking internal tree..finished
Comparing bitmaps..finished
Checking Semantic tree:
File "/home/reiser/nina" not linked to any inode!
Saving to
finished
There are on the filesystem:
Dirs linked to
Leaves 17592014
Internal nodes 28487287
Directories 472928428
Other files 287848293
Data block pointers 294892849 (273742 of them are zero)
Safe links 28738783
###########
reiserfsck finished at Mon Jun 9 16:11:27 2008
###########
[reiser@slashdot ~]$ mv
[reiser@slashdot ~]$
Re:Why? (Score:2, Interesting)
I get all my legal knowledge from Law and Order so this could be all wrong.
Re:*sigh* (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:this reminds me of oj simpson (Score:0, Interesting)
Prosecutors have to presume that defendents are guilty, how else can they go about prosecuting a case. If a prosecutor honestly believes that a defentdent is not guilty from all the evidence he has gathered, then he is commiting perjury in continuing a case. Those kinds of prosecutors have no business as prosecutors. They should be locked up for falsely bringing up cases. We've had many sentenced murderers proven innocent from DNA tests in recent years. Those prosecutors that withhold evidence to get convictions should be strung up for manipulating the system and destroying an innocent person's life. It's wrong; it's malicious; it's unnecessary. We have enough criminals in society.
If OJ really was guilty, the prosecution should have done a better job at proving beyond a resonable doubt that OJ did it. Hans Reiser deserves the same. Unfortunately, Hans wanted to defend himself. If he had left it up to a capable lawyer to defend him, he might have gotten a not guilty verdict. Now, he just looks like an ass. He had sufficient evidence to prove reasonable doubt, but he chose to defend himself and take the stand. He provided the evidence to the jury to remove reasonable doubt in their minds. People will assume that intelligence and aloofness are criminal traits. I've met Hans years ago, and he struck me as an ass and a scumbag. If his personality was part of the evidence, I'd probably assume he's guilty. He should have just STFU and sat quietly while a lawyer defended him.
If he can provide his wife's body, then he obviously is guilty. This idea of plea bargaining at this stage just to reduce a sentence is retarded. Plea bargains should be done at the beginning, not after the fact.
Captcha = acquit
Re:*sigh* (Score:5, Interesting)
Whether it influenced his joining the SS or not, civilian rocketry was forbidden by the Nazi party, so it was either join them or don't do it. While I don't know his personal beliefs, in many ways he was a victim of circumstance - he was an SS officer before he claimed to have known about the deaths in labor camps (though I'm sure he knew they were anti-semitic) and at one point was under investigation by the gestapo during the war for anti-patriotic thinking. Given the situation and the government running a police state spying and incarcerating anyone that opposed them, I imagine he felt powerless to change it.
Re:World's Greatest Detective (Score:3, Interesting)
Neither the defense nor the prosecution want stupid jurors - it makes the job of putting forward their arguments harder, not easier. Each side has a number of peremtory chanllenges, plus unlimited "for cause" challenges. Neither side has more opportunity to "stack" a jury with dummies, even if they wanted to.
Re:World's Greatest Detective (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm in the "law enforcement business" and have also been through the jury selection process personally, although always am dismissed due to my obvious bias due to my job affiliation.
The challenge process does not disprove my assessment. What you're left with is always the lowest common denominator that both sides can agree on. That nearly invariably filters out all but the most apparently malleable minds.
Since you've sat as a juror, I'm sorry that I've indirectly insulted you, maybe both sides of your case actually wanted someone intelligent in the box, but it's certainly the exception and not the rule
Re:*sigh* (Score:2, Interesting)
Finding the body does not automagically make Hans less of a threat. Why would his sentence be reduced ? He should be grateful the victim's family doesn't have him drawn and quartered.
Re:World's Greatest Detective (Score:5, Interesting)
Sorry about the "TV" remark - it's just that people believe in "Law and Order" momemts. Jury duty is WORK, not a show.
Nowadays, jurors will hear evidence related not just to DNA, but also blood spatter analysis, cellphone tower coverage and call records, autopsy reports, reports from the cops, EMT and doctors on the scene, other experts and witnesses, as well as the defendant. They get the reports, records, photos, and the actual evidentiary pieces, such as the murder weapon(s), clothing, etc. to take with them into the deliberation room.
They also get careful instructions from the judge.
Then again, we do things differently in Canada. For example, unlike the US, jurors are forbidden, under penalty of going to jail for 2 years, of ever revealing anything that was said or done during deliberations. To avoid even the appearance of impropriety, I told my employers that I would only hand in the notice for the trial AFTER it was concluded, and I didn't tell anyone who was on trial - I didn't want anyone searching the net or reading newspaper articles and accidently influencing me. Jury duty pays $90/day, plus transportation, parking, and meals; I lost money, and so did other jurors, but obviously some things are more important. People that don't want to make the sacrifices (including, in this case, a whole month off work), aren't the type of people you want on a jury anyway, right?
Think about it - there are no "tell-all" book deals by jurors after a trial in Canada - and I believe it's better that way. We reached a decision. How or why we reached it is just between the 12 of us. We'll never talk about that part of it again, even amongst each other.
C and C++, ever heard of em? (Score:3, Interesting)
C and C++, for starters. In what system where "NULL" (as distinct from "null") is actually a defined term does it not mean zero*?
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.
No, NULL is a pointer, and a pointer is an unsigned integer. You can't assign the value of "valueless" to an integer. You can assign zero. In the vast majority of systems, the comparison of "NULL == 0" is true, and thus of course "NULL == NULL" is also true.
Hell, even in java, "null == null" would return true. That's the whole point of having a 'null' value; being able to compare other pointers and references to this value, to see if they are valid.
* Of course since it's just a #define value in C, it can be different and there are always exceptions. In fact I worked on a system at IBM where they defined NULL as some non-zero 64-bit value, simply because they wanted to force programmers to use if (pointer != NULL) instead of the lazier (but usually equally correct) if (pointer). Personally I think this created as many bugs as it prevented.
Re:C and C++, ever heard of em? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:*sigh* (Score:5, Interesting)
"The rocket worked perfectly except for landing on the wrong planet." -- von Braun after hearing about a V-2 launch towards England
Re:reasonable doubt (Score:5, Interesting)
One of the people he claimed to have murdered is still alive.
Re:*sigh* (Score:4, Interesting)
He has been resistant the entire time to say a single word about his own guilt. That is the action of a man who either thinks he did no wrong, or who knows he did wrong but thinks he is clever enough to get away with it.
If he reveals the location of the body, then it's clear that he's willing to move forward and admit that he committed murder. Which, in turn, means it's more likely for him to feel remorse and become rehabilitated.
Re:C and C++, ever heard of em? (Score:3, Interesting)
IBM didn't really care; they would happily ignore the spec and do it what they considered "the right way".
Another example that I recall was that their compiler disallowed catch(...). The logic was that your code should never throw an unexpected type of exception, so your catch() blocks should always specify exactly what they're expecting, such that if anything unexpected does happen, it will hit the uncaught exception handler and let you know something is busted. You'd think this could be a coding guideline (same with the "use if(pointer == NULL)" thing), but nope, they wanted to make sure it never happened.
Re:*sigh* (Score:3, Interesting)
"'Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? That's not my department' Says Werner Von Brown" http://members.aol.com/quentncree/lehrer/vonbraun.htm [aol.com]
Re:World's Greatest Detective (Score:4, Interesting)
Having recently gone through the jury selection process (I wasn't picked), I can say that although they don't want stupid people, they do seem to want ignorant ones. Both the prosecutor and the defense pretty much axed anybody who expressed any knowledge of the law, typical judicial conventions, or Constitutional knowledge. It seemed that if you could name the top ten finalists on American Idol but couldn't name your congressman, governor, or senator, you were just what they wanted. Sheep. Mindless, thoughtless, easily-led sheep.
Re:reasonable doubt (Score:3, Interesting)