Comment by tptacek
18 years ago
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.
"Um, no. That jury system would be called "never sentence anyone". This system aspires to spare the innocent, but there is never a guarantee."
I didn't say there is such a guarantee...just that our system is supposed to protect the innocent from conviction even if it means the guilty occasionally go free (at least many of our founding fathers felt that this was the purpose of our jury system). If you don't believe that is the correct way for our legal system to operate, we'll have to agree to disagree. I think it is more important for the courts to first do no evil than to always get vengeance for crimes committed (even if it's sometimes taken against an innocent party).
Anyway, I'm not saying I believe Hans is innocent, and I've also stated above that the circumstantial evidence is pretty overwhelming. But, I am saying that one should be cautious with purely circumstantial evidence, and that I would find it hard to convict someone if I were on a jury in a trial with only circumstantial evidence.
"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."
That's a completely different discussion, and I agree with your statement entirely, though I'm getting the impression that you consider it far less of a problem than I do.
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But it is pretty horrible that Hans was convicted of murder with only circumstantial evidence. For petty crimes, or even for more intense crimes like battery, it might be worth it to make decisions based entirely on risky (though possibly accurate) circumstantial evidence. But when the most valuable portion of a person's life is on the line, the legal system's stance has to be that this person can only be convicted if there is hard evidence he committed the horrible crime, no matter how much we may want to believe that circumstantial evidence.
Imagine what the result is if we're wrong about Hans. He is an extraordinarily smart person, a valuable member of society, and could have made significant accomplishments in the next 25 years with his intelligence and experience. If we're wrong then we're throwing away his future contributions to society, depriving people that he would have helped of his assistance, stealing him from his friends, and in general not allowing him to have a positive effect on anyone's life for the next 25 years. Admittedly, in the grand scheme of things, that isn't too horrible, but it would certainly be horrible for the people that he would have had a good effect on. Perhaps he would have inspired some child to go on and do great things. We can't know.
Based on that, if a person is to be imprisoned for a huge portion of his life then there should be no doubt about his guilt.
It's true that it's impossibly unlikely that Nina made herself vanish, but consider that someone else could have used her to frame him.
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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).
Where by precedence, you mean to say "multiple centuries of jurisprudence built around it". There is nothing wrong with circumstantial evidence.
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