6 ms·

My interview with murderer Hans Reiser

28 points by bgutierrez 18y ago

bilch 18y ago
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 18y ago
  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 18y ago
    Please for the love of sweet zombie jesus, tell me that was sarcasm.
- jcl 18y ago
  The main problem with the article is that it is not journalism, even though it's in the News section of Salon. The guy even tells Reiser, "I'm not really a journalist." This is why the article is peppered with "I"s, "me"s, opinions, speculations, breaches of ethics, and an awkward window onto the author's BDSM experiences.
smanek 18y ago
"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.
- rms 18y ago
  >from what I've read, at the time of the trial the prosecution didn't come close to meeting their burden. Sure they did. It was circumstantial evidence, but when you put it together it seems rather overwhelming. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=176098 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=176098
  - smanek 18y ago
    Correct me if I'm wrong, but the major evidence was: 1. He had taken out the front seat of his car 2. He had hosed down the interior 3. He had his passport and several thousand dollars in cash on him. 4. He kept removing the battery from his cellphone, after he was interrogated by police. 5. He bought a few books on homicide investigation, after his wifes homicide investigation began. 6. He lawyered up quickly. Numbers 1-3 seem very reasonable for someone living in their car. 4-5 make sense for someone who has just been interrogated by the police. And 6 is always a good idea - for anybody - before talking to the police. Taken with the fact that his wife was dating (and recently broke up with) a confessed serial killer I'd say we have reasonable doubt. He was, of course, guilty - I just don't think you could reasonably conclude it from the evidence presented at the trial. I think Plato said that knowledge must be "justified true belief." I don't think the jury could have known that he was guilty at the time they convicted him, because such a belief wasn't justified. It's kind of like a broken clock that just blinks '12:00.' By looking at that clock you can't know that it's noon, even if it incidentally is at that moment.
    - bayareaguy 18y ago
      I just don't think you could reasonably conclude it from the evidence presented at the trial. smanek, I'm guessing you weren't in the courtroom to observe Hans during the proceedings. Judging from what I've read I think Hans's courtroom behavior and crazy explanations led the jury to find him guilty. I'm glad he didn't take his lawyers' advice to keep his mouth shut.
      - gtt 18y ago
mroman 18y ago
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 18y ago
  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 18y ago
    "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 18y ago
      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.
m0nty 18y ago
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.
- joeread 18y ago
  It's always important to get the process correct in a civilized society.
- smanek 18y ago
  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.
erdos2 18y ago
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.
deleted 18y ago
[deleted]

28 points by bgutierrez 18y ago

bilch 18y ago

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 18y ago
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 18y ago
  Please for the love of sweet zombie jesus, tell me that was sarcasm.
jcl 18y ago
The main problem with the article is that it is not journalism, even though it's in the News section of Salon. The guy even tells Reiser, "I'm not really a journalist." This is why the article is peppered with "I"s, "me"s, opinions, speculations, breaches of ethics, and an awkward window onto the author's BDSM experiences.

smanek 18y ago

"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.

rms 18y ago
>from what I've read, at the time of the trial the prosecution didn't come close to meeting their burden. Sure they did. It was circumstantial evidence, but when you put it together it seems rather overwhelming. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=176098 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=176098
- smanek 18y ago
  Correct me if I'm wrong, but the major evidence was: 1. He had taken out the front seat of his car 2. He had hosed down the interior 3. He had his passport and several thousand dollars in cash on him. 4. He kept removing the battery from his cellphone, after he was interrogated by police. 5. He bought a few books on homicide investigation, after his wifes homicide investigation began. 6. He lawyered up quickly. Numbers 1-3 seem very reasonable for someone living in their car. 4-5 make sense for someone who has just been interrogated by the police. And 6 is always a good idea - for anybody - before talking to the police. Taken with the fact that his wife was dating (and recently broke up with) a confessed serial killer I'd say we have reasonable doubt. He was, of course, guilty - I just don't think you could reasonably conclude it from the evidence presented at the trial. I think Plato said that knowledge must be "justified true belief." I don't think the jury could have known that he was guilty at the time they convicted him, because such a belief wasn't justified. It's kind of like a broken clock that just blinks '12:00.' By looking at that clock you can't know that it's noon, even if it incidentally is at that moment.
  - bayareaguy 18y ago
    I just don't think you could reasonably conclude it from the evidence presented at the trial. smanek, I'm guessing you weren't in the courtroom to observe Hans during the proceedings. Judging from what I've read I think Hans's courtroom behavior and crazy explanations led the jury to find him guilty. I'm glad he didn't take his lawyers' advice to keep his mouth shut.
    - gtt 18y ago

mroman 18y ago

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 18y ago
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 18y ago
  "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 18y ago
    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.

m0nty 18y ago

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.

joeread 18y ago
It's always important to get the process correct in a civilized society.
smanek 18y ago
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.

erdos2 18y ago

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.

deleted 18y ago

[deleted]