

My interview with murderer Hans Reiser - bgutierrez
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2008/07/09/hans_reiser/

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smanek
"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.

~~~
bayareaguy
_from what I've read, at the time of the trial the prosecution didn't come
close to meeting their burden_

I think the only people qualified to decide that were the members of the jury.
The vast majority of the rest of us had only hearsay to go on.

~~~
jrockway
I believe the transcript of the trial is public record.

------
m0nty
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.

~~~
smanek
It has nothing to do with him being a linux coder. It doesn't really matter
who you are, you should be given a fair trial. And, this was simply a piece of
bad reporting - regardless of who the suspect was.

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bilch
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.

~~~
ScottWhigham
Its from salon though... Gotta be reputable. This is the kind of news that HN
has been missing though! We need to be more like reddit and digg!

~~~
biohacker42
Please for the love of sweet zombie jesus, tell me that was sarcasm.

------
erdos2
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.

------
mroman
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.

~~~
bgutierrez
Contempt and scorn are appropriate feelings to have for murderers.

I thought this article was interesting because the author had spent a lot of
time watching Reiser in court and might be speaking some truth about Reiser's
personality.

Is there anyone here that knew Reiser more intimately than this journalist,
and could give us some feedback?

~~~
omouse
_"Contempt and scorn are appropriate feelings to have for murderers."_

Oh really? What about those trained to kill? Such as those in the military?

This is a tangent, but I'm curious...

~~~
bgutierrez
The definition of murder as "the unlawfully killing of a human with malice
aforethought" is a good one that applies well to Hans Reiser and shows the
importance of motivation in determining whether or not someone is a criminal.

When soldiers are learning to kill an enemy that may not even exist, they have
very different motivations when compared to someone that is planning to kill a
personal enemy.

I believe that both individuals and nations have the right of self-defense, so
I don't hold contempt for anyone that is learning to kill in order to defend
himself or the people he has a responsibility to defend.

~~~
omouse
Hmm. That is a good point.

~~~
bgutierrez
Thanks. Your question made me really think.

