since i'm apparently blogging again

i may as well share my important thoughts on something topical.

hans reiser was found guilty of first degree, premeditated murder.

i haven't followed the case closely, however, many things are made clear from the article: hans was convicted without a body, without a weapon, without any solid evidence that his wife is even dead. at the time of her disappearance she had stolen money from him and was having an affair. it is understandable if he did not then and does not now like her much.

understandable to me, that is. apparently the american jury system is capable of finding 12 people who are unable to empathize with these feelings, but can be convinced that someone who "would immediately be familiar with the implications of removed batteries", someone who is "arrogant" and does not miss his thieving, cheating wife must therefore have murdered her.

more than angry, this piece of news has me scared. i know a lot of people who behave like hans. they're called programmers. many of the best ones (and hans was certainly one of the best) are both devoted to and impressed by their own genius. it seems like the prosecutor was able to turn the jury's jealousy of hans' intelligence against him, conflating the hallmark traits of a cowboy-programmer with those of a murderer.

it's not that hard for me to understand why hans may have seemed arrogant on the stand, because i've seen the same situation unfold hundreds of times in my work. someone of presumed lesser intelligence (in the workplace, QA, in the courtroom, the DA) accuses the cowboy of something (a bug, a murder). the cowboy, unimpressed with the lack of evidence to support the claim, may become irritable (his intelligence was insulted), arrogant (doesn't this idiot know that extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof?), obstinate (intelligence insulted), and insulting (you think i'm dumb enough to have a bug? i'll show you how dumb *you* are).

this may sound like "extreme" behavior but i've seen it hundreds of times (well, the QA/bug version, not the DA/murder version). It takes very little imagination on my part to guess that hans is the type of guy who behaves like this and is incapable of masking his indignation when accused of something he thinks is unjust.

and because the jury didn't like his 'tude, and because they were suspicious of a guy who is capable of removing a cell phone battery, they convicted him of a crime (without a body or weapon) that could result in the death penalty.

without a body or a weapon.

to a guy like hans that's got to throw his mental gears into a lockup. for a mind that enjoys rigorous logic of the complex variety (and his has got to, to do the sort of programming he did), the failure of 14 people to grasp the elementary logic of "if there's no body, there is reasonable doubt that she is dead" must be crippling.

perhaps their inability to comprehend simple logic like this caused hans to seem "arrogant". and perhaps the intellectual insecurities of the jury, faced with sensing (or knowing? maybe he told them) why hans thought they were stupid, led to them jealously convicting to validate some smug sense of superiority.

it's grade-school politics. beat up the smart kid. only in this case, they may kill him.