Hans Reiser was recently convicted for first degree murder for killing his wife in 2006. The six month trial and three days of Jury deliberation reached the guilty verdict primarily based on circumstantial evidence and poor testimony from Hans Reiser:

In a murder case with no body, no crime scene, no reliable eyewitness and virtually no physical evidence, the prosecution began the trial last November with a daunting task ahead. By the time prosecutor Paul Hora rested his case February 14, he had called some 60 witnesses, but presented mostly circumstantial evidence demonstrating animus between Reiser and his wife, and suspicious behavior by the defendant following Nina’s disappearance in September, 2006.

The turning point in the trial came when Reiser took the stand in his own defense March 3.

In his 11 days of testimony, Reiser offered lengthy and verbose explanations for every piece of circumstantial evidence. But Reiser’s version of events often drew disbelieving head shakes from jurors — and occasional smirks from the trial judge.

Namesys, who develops the ReiserFS and Reiser4 linux filesystems, is essentially dead after the verdict. The Namesys website is down due to a DNS problem, and a potential private sale of the company found no buyers. Worse, ReiserFS sucks, according to Kerneltrap:

Reiserfs might be suitable for very specific applications, but to use it in production machine, you need to have some guts.

My last reiserfs partition was blown up two days ago, because of a bad sector, plus a fatal oops, looping endlessly. This was the second time, and the last one, as none of my ext3 filesystems *ever* had similar problems, despite numerous other bad sector issues. Not mentioning the funny “recovery” tool, which generally finishes to trash your data.

And in a bit of off-the-mark dark humour, an anonymous Wikipedia editor added a new column to Comparison of file systems:

There are some irregularities surrounding the Hans Reiser trial, namely that “Sean Sturgeon, a one-time friend of Reiser, and alleged ex-lover of Nina, confessed to killing eight other people and leaving a ninth for dead. However, he claims he did not kill Nina. According to preliminary court testimony, Sturgeon dated Nina, but she broke off the relationship in January 2006.”

Update: Wired is reporting that Hans Reiser is offering the location of Nina’s body in exchange for a reduced sentence. Interestingly, he refused a deal of an “11-year term in exchange to pleading guilty to manslaughter” before the trial started.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 30th, 2008 at 8:22 pm and is tagged with reiserfs partition, first degree murder, linux filesystems, poor testimony, jury deliberation, dark humour, namesys, bad sector, dns problem, sector issues, circumstantial evidence, hans reiser, recovery tool, suspicious behavior, guilty verdict, animus, wikipedia, physical evidence, daunting task, murder case. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback.