Comment by mechanical_fish
18 years ago
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.
I would find it hard to convict someone if I were on a jury in a trial with only circumstantial evidence.
And so would I. But neither you nor I are on the jury, and so we don't know the full extent of the evidence.
I'm getting the impression that you consider it far less of a problem than I do.
Well, that impression is probably mistaken, unless what you're saying is that there's no amount of circumstantial evidence that should send a guy to prison. If all we're arguing about is the degree of the evidence... that's why we have juries.
I will say that my opinion would be closer to yours if Reiser were in danger of being sentenced to death. I disbelieve in the death penalty for precisely the reasons you describe. As it is, if Reiser isn't a murderer, there's a very good chance that he won't spend 25 years in prison -- Nina could turn up alive, or turn up dead in circumstances that exonerate Reiser. This isn't his last chance. Unless he's guilty.
We actually know several things the jury does not know. For instance, the DA sought to have admitted emails from Nina to Hans that referred directly to overt threats Hans had made. They weren't allowed due to hearsay rules.
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If all we're arguing about is the degree of the evidence... that's why we have juries.
The problem is that a judge must interpret a guilty verdict as an immutable fact, rather than as a decision made by emotional and fundamentally random human beings:
Instead, a person's prison sentence should reflect how confident we are in the guilty verdict.
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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.
"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."
I really don't like this line of argument, because it implies that if he were not an extraordinarily smart person, a valuable member of society, without significant accomplishments, then he should be convicted. If it were a homeless divorced guy living out of his minivan, should he have been convicted? How about a blue-collar landscaper? An unemployed househusband?
A society's standards of justice say far more about the society than they do about the people who go on trial before them. We have laws instead of kings because there's this wonderful innovation called "equal before the law". We owe a lot of Western civilization to that.
The part I find disturbing is that he was essentially convicted because the jury didn't like him. I know this happens all the time - this is why lawyers have you wear a suit in court, and why they agonize over whether you should testify or not, and why they coach you on what to say on the stand, and why they have closing arguments. But it's usually not quite so overt. He made an ass out of himself at his own trial - I'd like to believe that it shouldn't matter when "justice is blind", but of course it does, and that's why he's going to jail.
There's a difference between being convicted "because the jury doesn't like you" and being convicted "because you manage to do supernatural damage to your credibility on the stand".
I think that if Reiser had shut up and not testified, he'd have gotten manslaughter. It seems clear that his demeanor amped his conviction up to murder. But the jury didn't do that on a whim: Reiser managed to portrary himself as deceptive, evasive, and utterly unconcerned over the welfare of his family. That got factored in. How could it not?
Full agreement. A+++, would upvote again.
I was trying to enumerate the good qualities of Hans. If it were someone else, I would have listed their positive qualities. I didn't mean to imply that they should affect the verdict, but meant to communicate "if we're wrong about Hans, the following value is lost: an extremely smart person, ..."
It's made even worse by the fucked up state of the US prison system -- his contribution really doesn't need to wasted. Would it be so horrible to give him a laptop and some internet access and let him hack?
Wow, what an enormous rathole you have discovered.
Let me politely decline to explore this complex issue of justice, policing, and ethics -- one which probably should be decided case-by-case rather than by a one-size-fits-all rule -- and just point out that accepting patches from an apparently-insane convicted murderer is really, really bad P.R. for your open source project.
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I know for sure that I'll be championing Phil Spector to be allowed to continue evolving his Wall of Sound once he gets convicted!
>>> Would it be so horrible to give him a laptop and some internet access and let him hack?
Yes it would. The only hacking he'll be doing is with a shiv.
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http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=537280&cid=23231...
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Why is it "horrible" that he was convicted with indirect evidence? People are convicted without eyewitnesses all the time. That's why we have juries.
People are routinely convicted of murder (or other substantial crimes) without hard evidence? Because I was referring to high crimes, not petty thefts or speeding tickets.
It's 25 years of a smart man's life. Let's at least be 100% positive about his guilt.
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