Hans Reiser, convicted murderer and creator of the ReiserFS
file system, led Oakland, California police to
the location of his wife’s body on Monday in return for a lesser sentence.
Reiser was found guilty of the first-degree murder of Nina Reiser late last
April, and is due for sentencing later this week. He originally plead not
guilty, instead claiming that Nina had fled to her native country of Russia
after embezzling money from Reiser’s company, Namesys.
In his trial, Reiser’s defense attempted to characterize him as a
“misunderstood geek,” claiming that courts and the police were misinterpreting
a variety of findings used against him. Some of those findings include both his
and Nina's abandoned cars – one of which had its floorboards flooded in what
was described as a misinformed cleaning attempt – as well as traces of her
blood in his residence and car.
Under the terms of his deal, Reiser’s conviction will be commuted to
second-degree murder, changing his minimum sentence from 25 years to 15 years.
Both first- and second-degree murder carry a maximum life sentence. The San
Francisco Chronicle speculates that recent developments could delay
sentencing.
Reiser’s defense attorney, William Du Bois, refused to comment on a reduced
sentence, the details of which have not yet been sealed. “We don’t know. Talk
to the D.A,” he said.
A fellow inmate said Reiser rushed to a television set in February 2007, in
order to watch a news report that said a body was found in the Oakland hills.
The inmate described Reiser as “relieved” when the report revealed that the
body did not fit Nina’s description.
Reiser later confirmed police suspicions that he had strangled Nina to death
after a fight – something prosecutors argued for heavily due to the lack of a
murder weapon and Reiser’s martial arts training. At the time of Nina’s death
in September 2006, the two were embroiled in a messy divorce.
The ReiserFS file system, which was praised for its ingenuity and for
bringing a number of never-seen-before features to Linux, experienced a wane in
popularity in light of Reiser’s arrest and conviction. While the file system is
still the default choice for a number of Linux distributions, including Xandros
and Linspire, it appears that it lost some of its support from Novell, which
announced it moved
SUSE Enterprise Linux to the ext3 file system on October 12, 2006 – two
days after Reiser’s arrest. Novell representatives say the two
events are unrelated.
Further, the current status of Namesys is still unknown. Reiser previously
announced plans to sell the company in order to finance his defense, but it
appears that he has yet to find a buyer.