Mr. Reiser, Linux programmer turned convicted murder, listens with his attorney as the judge reads the sentence. (Source: Wired News/Norman Quebedeau)
Hans Reiser will spend at least the next 15 years behind bars for murdering his wife
Former computer engineer Hans Reiser was today sentenced 15-to-life after a first-degree murder conviction after he strangled his wife and buried her in a ravine.
Reiser's claim to fame in the computer world is the ReiserFS file system, a general-purpose file system used in the Linux operating system. ReiserFS is still popular in Linspire, Xandros and other Linux distributions, but has lost support in Novell SUSE Linux and other distributions.
Before being sentenced, Reiser read a multiple page statement in the same Oakland courtroom where he was found guilty in April.
Reiser spent 11 days during the trial denying he had anything to do with his wife Nina Reiser's disappearance, but he was still convicted by jurors because of circumstantial and blood evidence. A first-degree murder conviction carries a 25-to-life sentence, but because he showed police authorities where his wife's body was located, he faced 15-to-life.
Nina Reiser, 31, was last seen driving to her husbands Oakland hills home on September 3, 2006, to drop off their kids for the Labor Day weekend. The couple were engaged in a bitter divorce, but very few people expected the former Linux computer geek would be capable of killing his wife.
A scheduled August 13 hearing was delayed in part due to aligning attorneys' schedules, and wasn't because of a stall in talks among both parties. Furthermore, Alameda County Superior Court Judge Larry Goodman and the Alameda County District Attorney's office had to make sure Reiser fulfilled all his obligations as part of the deal that was not approved by the court before today. One of the obligations Reiser agreed to was that he would not appeal the ruling, regardless of what happened.
In closed court last week, Reiser spoke for more than an hour, with speculation involving details of his crime and how he killed his wife. There was another closed court session on Monday, where he tried to fire one of his attorneys, although the prosecution and his defense did not go into detail about what happened.
The disgraced programmer admitted he strangled his wife to death after the two got into an argument, and he killed her while their two children played video games in a different room.
Fully convinced he would be able to trick the jury into believing his wife left the country, it was unveiled Reiser turned down a three-year prison voluntary manslaughter deal and took the case to trial. The prosecution tried to offer him a deal because they wanted to spare Nina Reiser's family the pain of going through a trial.
The Hans Reiser murder drama is officially over.
"Nowadays, security guys break the Mac every single day. Every single day, they come out with a total exploit, your machine can be taken over totally. I dare anybody to do that once a month on the Windows machine." -- Bill Gates
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