“Guilty”, says the jury.

Hans Reiser, creator of the open source Reiserfs filesystem used on Linux systems, was arrested on 10 October 2006, charged with murdering his Russian wife, Nina Reiser. After a trial spanning six months, the jury in the Reiser murder trial has apparently found him guilty of murder in the first degree. This verdict was reached despite the fact that, apart from loads of circumstantial evidence, there has hardly been any physical evidence uncovered. (Check out Wired.com’s coverage of the Hans Reiser trial)

Excerpts from the quotes from juror No. 7, Vince Dunn, as they appeared in a Wired.com article:

I was looking at his eyes, he was faking it.

After a while, we started to see how arrogant he was, how little sympathy he had for his wife

When asked when he thought Reiser had killed his wife, Dunn said,

I think he choked her and at some point and stabbed her. That’s a big question.

Hans Reiser has a black belt in judo, which includes choking in its repertoire of moves. I’m pretty sure anyone with a black belt in judo could potentially kill with choke-holds alone, so why resort to messy stabbing?

Reading the reports of the Reiser trial, I have to agree that his actions and the surrounding circumstances do indeed seem suspicious. Nina’s blood on the car seat and a pillar of his home, the discarded front passenger seat of his car, his apparent paranoia — definitely difficult to explain, despite Reiser’s attempts at the ‘geek defense‘. However, I did think that for a murder charge, the prosecution had to prove beyond reasonable doubt, that the crime had been committed. Personally, I still have doubts about the Reiser case.

Nina’s body was never found. I’m not sure how the prosecution could be so sure that a murder had been committed, when there’s no proof that the suspected victim is even dead. There are no witnesses, no body, no murder weapon. Just an apparently strong motive (Nina was apparently having an affair with Reiser’s friend, and Reiser suspected her of embezzling money from his company, Namesys.) and many testimonies that Nina was a loving mother and would never leave her children to flee back to Russia as Reiser claims.

Strangely enough, prosecutor Paul Hora claims that “there isn’t a shred, a speck of evidence that this woman is alive“, he hasn’t shown any conclusive evidence that she’s dead either. Sure she’s missing, but apparently, people do go missing in this world without necessarily being dead.

Stranger still, is how the jury was not allowed to hear testimony of how Sean Sturgeon, Reiser’s former best friend and with whom Nina Reiser was said to have had an affair, had confessed to killing eight other people — though those killings were unrelated to the case. One would have thought that someone with a history of murder might be key to a murder case, especially when the alleged victim had broken up with him earlier in the year.

I use Linux and I’m a fan of open source software, but to be sure, I’m no Reiser apologist. I just don’t think it’s been proved beyond reasonable doubt that Reiser is guilty of premeditated (first degree) murder.

Suspicious? Yes. Guilty? I’m not so sure.