Computer Programmer's Attorneys Use 'Geek Defense'

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Computer Programmer's Attorneys Use 'Geek Defense'
On Trial for Murder, Man Being Portrayed As Eccentric, Difficult

By Karl Vick
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, February 24, 2008; Page A03

OAKLAND, Calif. -- When Nina Reiser disappeared in September 2006, investigators suspecting foul play looked long and hard at her estranged husband, the computer genius Hans. Eccentric, awkward and notoriously difficult as a human being, Hans Reiser proved quite accommodating when it came to providing clues.

After taking no part in the massive public effort to search for the mother of his two children, he listed the reasons he was happy that Nina was gone in a phone call monitored by police. He discreetly purchased copies of "Masterpieces of Murder" and "Homicide" from a local bookstore. Police discovered his passport in his fanny pack along with $8,000 in cash and a cellphone that could not be tracked electronically because its battery was removed, just like the phone found inside Nina's minivan, which was found abandoned on a side street smelling of rotting groceries; she had been to the store before dropping the kids at Hans's house.

Police also found soaked floorboards in his car and an empty space where the passenger seat should have been.

In the courtroom where Hans Reiser is on trial for murder, all this might appear to indicate guilty knowledge. But his attorneys cast it as evidence of an innocence peculiar to Hans, a computer programmer so immersed in the folds of his own intellect that he had no idea how complicit he was making himself appear.

"Being too intelligent can be a sort of curse," defense counsel William Du Bois said. "All this weird conduct can be explained by him, but he's the only one who can do it. People who are commonly known as computer geeks are so into the field."

And so this week, after a prosecution case that took almost three months, Du Bois launched what Wired magazine dubbed "the Geek Defense." In court, Du Bois has taken pains to portray his client as an irritating nebbish. He has repeatedly asked Alameda County Circuit Court Judge Larry Goodman to order his client to stop distracting him by talking in his ear at the defense table. He called Reiser "an inconsiderate slob" in front of the jury.

"We're leaving the right message," Du Bois said outside court. "He's a very difficult person. It's very difficult to represent a genius."

The effort will be watched and appreciated down the breadth of Silicon Valley, perhaps the only place a computer genius might find a jury of peers.

There, Hans Reiser's actions appear fairly reasonable, at least to people who spend much more time with computer code than with other humans.

"It strikes me that a lot of coders have a somewhat detached view of the world, and it's reasonable to assume that Hans might not even have stopped to think about how things looked," said Rick Moen, a local area network consultant in Menlo Park.

"I remove my cellphone battery periodically, and I've taught many people to do the same," noted John Gilmore, a founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is challenging the Bush administration in court on wiretaps. "What can you do when the FCC mandates tracking capability to every cellphone? On the lame excuse that once in a while someone calls 911 and can't give the address."

On his LinuxMafia site, Moen maintains a timeline of the case culled from the posts filed from correspondents in the courthouse gallery 35 miles north, live-blogging the trial for the San Francisco Chronicle and Wired's Threat Level blog.

"I met Hans a couple of times socially, and he did not strike me as being all that peculiar for a technical person," Moen said. "A little bit intense, a bit highly focused. Quite bright."

Now 44, Reiser was accepted at the University of California at Berkeley at age 14. He wrote a role-playing game to compete with Dungeons & Dragons and dabbled in science fiction. His signal adult achievement was ReiserFS, a file system he named for himself, unusual in the programming world. The system organizes data on Linux, the "open source" operating system.

After opening a company in Russia, he met Nina Sharanova, a striking obstetrician-gynecologist using a dating service to meet foreigners. They married when she became pregnant, but after the second child was born in 2001, Nina began an affair with Hans's best friend, Sean Sturgeon. The cross-dressing bondage and discipline enthusiast had been "maid of honor" at their wedding.

The ensuing divorce was ugly. Hans accused Nina of Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy, saying she made their son ill for her own gratification. Nina complained of Hans's avowed enthusiasm for violent video games, which he encouraged the boy to play as a rite of passage. Relations were so brittle that a police officer seeing them exchange the children one day advised Nina to "get a gun."

She was last seen at Hans's house, where she was dropping off the children for Labor Day weekend 2006. She was 31 then.

"His undergraduate thesis is on how if you change the perspective, the reality is different," said Ramon Reiser, the defendant's mathematician father, folding a pair of pants in the courtroom hallway as he waited to testify.

The thesis might apply to the evidence, which the judge in the preliminary hearing termed thin. Ramon Reiser argued that it's likelier that Nina is back in her native Russia with funds embezzled from her husband's business than in an unmarked grave she was carried to in the soaked, seatless Honda CR-X. The children are with Nina's mother in St. Petersburg.

"When you look at it, would Hans Reiser turn a hose on a car to wash it? Absolutely, his mother told him to get that car cleaned up," the elder Reiser said.

"I and my brother -- maybe it's genetic -- have driven our cars without the front seat. It's really convenient."

If Hans Reiser testifies in his own defense, his attorney said the risk is that "this guy is so weird, it's a little tricky to wrap yourself around it if you're a juror." He described his client as borderline for Asperger's Syndrome, a condition that self-described geeks call unusually common in the computer industry, combining as it does an exceptional ability to focus with an inability to read social cues.

Gilmore added that the unforgiving nature of computers demands of coders "a perfectionism that makes it hard sometimes in social situations. When I see something that's a little bit wrong, and I ought to just shut up and roll with it, but I comment and it causes trouble with the people around me. Back-seat driving and that sort of thing."

Yet not all the strangeness in the case arises from computers. Du Bois takes every opportunity to mention Sturgeon, who in addition to his role as Hans's friend and Nina's lover, told investigators that he killed eight people years ago. It's unclear whether the claim is true: Sturgeon remains free. But the judge forbade attorneys from mentioning the claim in court.

In any event, Sturgeon reportedly has insisted that whatever his crimes, he had nothing to do with Nina's disappearance. Wired quoted him as saying that, in the Reiser case, he is red herring, or rather, he said, "a red Sturgeon."

Coming attraction: "My Asperger's made me do it"

This defense is not a defense of the crime of murder, it is a defense about why the evidence looks strange. If there is real evidence that is fit to be used in a court of law it wouldn't matter if the defendant has a strange personality or "looks guilty." People should not be convicted of anything for "looking guilty." OJ was let off because the police couldn't put together a solid case against him. Other people run out of money to pay their attorneys and simply get dumped before they can show that there is no good case against them, and subsequently go to jail. The courts do not maintain the standards that they should maintain in order to maintain any validity of their authority.

No 'Body of Evidence' topic

If there is no body (corpse), then there is no evidence linking Reiser to a murder. This a frustrating problem for the legal prosecution, Asperger's or not. If there is just a shadow of a doubt, there may be an aquittal or a new trial, and precious time is lost to find the guilty party.

OJ got off because they screwed up all of the forensic evidence. Lack of following proper procedures, tracking through the blood of the victims, moving the victims before proper authorities in corpses were called (and then those authorities washing the bodies and removing trace evidence), making a video recording showing the investigators missing essential parts of the crime scene evidence protection, lousy evidence tracking, ect. was what got him off in the end. Had they documented and done everything properly, there would have been a much, much higher chance of a conviction.

There have been murder cases in which there are no bodies, and there have been convictions resulting from such. In some cases, the area where the body is hidden is just far too big to search completely (in example, the desert, some of the state parks, ect), and in some cases, the body was disposed of too thoroughly (the case of the man who ran his wife through the wood chipper was the first, if I'm not mistaken). Of course, problems come from it sometimes (a man who was accused of murdering his girlfriend went to trial (the "evidence" was their fight and the subsequent discovery of a skeleton hand in the same area), only for the girlfriend to walk in halfway through, obviously alive (the hand was from a bear, they later discovered)), but by large, if there is enough evidence to suggest that the victim is dead (such as a large amount of blood, the discovery of certain parts of the body (teeth, ect)), and enough evidence to convict someone, they'll press charges. His behavior looks suspicious enough that, if they play it right, they can get a conviction.

I thought that trying to make the jury dislike him was kind of odd, but to each their own. I don't study law; my interest lies in crime itself and sometimes the subsequent trials, but more often than not, I don't read much into those.

Like I said, in the case of OJ they couldn't put together a good case. Maybe there was a way to do it, but they apparently didn't know how, did they?

And what kind of idiots take a case to court using a bear's hand as physical evidence?

No, they obviously didn't; I'm not saying that they did. However, they had a large amount of evidence that could have been put together for a solid case had they not screwed it up. There doesn't sound like there's all that much evidence in this case.

Ones who don't check. In reality, bears' hands look very similar to humans' hands once they're skeletons. It's not the first time that such a mistake has been made, of course; it might have been the first time that it got into court as evidence though.

Last edited by RainSong on 26 Feb 2008, 8:04 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I haven't seen much evidence that law enforcement or the courts can do anything in a competent manner.

It's much more difficult than people tend to think it is; if one believes the tv shows, all the detectives have to do is wait for an hour, and look, they have the answer! In reality, it doesn't work like that at all. There have been many cases when they did have evidence that was competent and treated it like such, but those cases don't tend to be media worthy.

They should be media worthy. Such a case is both surprising and shocking.