Comment by breily
18 years ago
Regardless of whether he did it or not, this seems like a failure of the justice system - sentencing someone to 25 years in prison for a murder in which there is "no body, no crime scene, no reliable eyewitness and virtually no physical evidence". He must have had an absolutely horrible lawyer.
His lawyer told him not to take the stand. Instead he testified for 11 days.
The very first thing he did when he took the stand on cross from the DA was to admit that he had lied about a material fact of the case, allowing the jury to be instructed that the rest of his testimony was untrustworthy. He did a pretty spectacularly bad job on the stand.
I'm surprised he went down for murder 1, but there was a pretty damning array of things lined up against him. Aspergers or not, he admittedly ripped up and flooded his car while trying to actively hide it from the police in a storage locker; he claimed a 6-inch(!)-wide blood stain on a bag (not a sleeping bag, but its pouch) in that car was from having sex; and finally, he built his case not on the premise that he didn't kill Nina, but that she was still alive --- a very simple assertion for the DA to knock down.
Once you take the stand, you have no control over how long you will be on the stand. The fifth amendment insures you don't have to testify if it will hurt your case...but if you agree to be questioned, both sides get to ask pretty much all the questions they want within the bounds of the law and the patience of the judge.
But, yes, it's clear that him taking the stand was the worst possible thing he could do and he apparently fought loudly and repeatedly with his lawyer over this decision.
To be clear: his lawyer was opposed to him taking the stand.
I don't understand. It sounds like you think that any murderer who can hide a body and clean a crime scene should be impossible to convict.
There's nothing wrong with circumstantial evidence. It's used all the time. The ambiguity you're having trouble coping with is the reason we have juries and strict rules regarding admissability.
If there is no body, how does one know it isn't an elaborate framing?
In this case, one could argue as follows:
Nina disappears, and one or more friends help her get to Russia incognito (go through Mexico, perhaps).
Children go into custody of her parents who take them back to Russia.
Meanwhile, Hans is the first suspect, as is always the case in murder cases where there is a spouse or former spouse with some plausible motive and no good alibi...he is known to be paranoid by anyone that knows him, so begins to behave erratically when police begin to pay attention to him.
Perhaps someone (maybe Nina, maybe the serial killer friend, maybe someone else) had sprinkled a little blood on the front seat of his car (and in his house and the sleeping bag). He panics when he sees it and rips the seat out and disposes of it. Since he didn't commit the crime in this scenario he wouldn't have even known about the blood in the sleeping bag or the house.
Since producing some blood is pretty trivial, it means that anyone with the means and willingness to disappear could frame anyone for murder.
There is a reason why murder cases without a body or murder weapon pretty rarely result in conviction. And, I suspect, had Hans taken his lawyer's advice and not taken the stand, he would have probably had a much better chance, even with the pretty strong circumstantial evidence.
I'm not saying Hans didn't do it...I don't know. But I know that circumstantial evidence should be viewed with suspicion, when 25 years of someones life is on the line. The jury system is intended to insure that no innocent man is ever convicted, and this principle is even more important than every guilty man being punished.
If there is no body, how does one know it isn't an elaborate framing?
You don't, if you're a philosopher. But the rule is beyond reasonable doubt, not beyond all conceivable doubt.
The reason to disbelieve the "elaborate framing" hypothesis is straightforward: It's really easy to prove, and yet it has not been proved. All you have to do to prove it is find Nina. And yet she has not been found.
In fiction you can make a character disappear by saying "they moved to Russia/Argentina/Outer Mongolia and disappeared". In the real world it really is harder than that. Russia is not on the moon. You can phone up some Russians right now if you want and have a chat. Even if the Russian government won't cooperate with an investigation, there must be private investigators in Russia. All Hans and his legal team have to do is hire a P.I. to stake out the kids and produce some evidence that they're being visited by a mystery woman who might be Nina and suddenly his case becomes a lot stronger. He could still do this now, from prison, if he wanted. Might really shorten that 25 year sentence.
I suppose you could argue that Nina is so sneaky and so well connected that she and her kids have truly vanished from mortal ken, like Osama bin Laden. I haven't followed the case, so I don't know if Reiser tried to argue that. If he did, it obviously didn't work.
And I suppose you could argue that the woman hates Hans so much that she's willing to be separated from her kids for 30 years (or forever, via suicide -- there's a Sherlock Holmes plot for you) just to maximize his suffering. Good luck selling that "reasonable" theory.
The jury system is intended to insure that no innocent man is ever convicted...
Um, no. That jury system would be called "never sentence anyone". This system aspires to spare the innocent, but there is never a guarantee. And I have to say that, in the annals of potential injustice, this is a pretty weak example. Literally thousands of innocent-but-convicted Americans would be free today if they had even half of the legal resources that Reiser hired and then apparently chose to ignore.
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I've worked with a number of people on the heavy end of the asperger's spectrum and one thing that I've found disturbing about their personalities is that when they make a mistake, they have an extremely hard time admitting that they are wrong. In fact, they don't admit they are wrong, they do everything they can to explain why they are actually right. From what I've read of his testimony, this seems like what Hans was doing.
An elaborate framing story is hard to believe as it is easy for a woman in California to get a divorce and custody of her children.
On the other hand, OJ got off his criminal charges scott free, and later went on to write a book about his murder technique. The jury system isn't infallible.
I don't have any data to back this up, but I imagine in almost every case where someone is convicted of murder and sentenced to 25 years in prison, there is actual evidence that a murder occurred.
I don't necessarily have a problem with circumstantial evidence, I just think that this is a very harsh sentence when there is no real evidence that anyone was killed.
It is damning circumstantial evidence, for sure. But only circumstantial, that is troubling (but there is precedence for convictions on circumstantial evidence of course).
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The article states that he refused to let his lawyer act and took charge of proceedings himself many times, so it is not clear how bad the lawyer was.
Yes that is what is troubling. It seems he is convicted on his own character/personality.
It would be pretty rough in 10 years if some other evidence turns up and his life is wasted.
There is also the children who are obviously victims in some sense as well, this must be horrible for them.
I thought for a conviction there had to be no shadow of doubt? There are shadows here.