Intellectual Property Law

Hans Reiser Taking Witness Stand Now; Did You Kill Your Wife?

By Ryan Singel, Kevin Poulsen, Sarah Lai Stirland, Kim Zetter, and David Kravets

OAKLAND, California -- Did you kill your wife, Mr. Reiser?

That question will be posed to Linux guru Hans Reiser at his murder trial here, perhaps as early as Monday. He is taking the stand now here in Alameda County Superior Court.

The open source developer's trial began Nov. 6 with opening arguments, and it's likely to end with the defendant's testimony -- days of questioning surrounding whether he killed the mother of his two children, a boy now 8 and girl now 6.

Reiser was arrested Oct. 10, 2006, more than a month after the wife he had met in Russia vanished.

There's been about 60 witnesses in the case, most of them called by prosecutor Paul Hora. The majority of them testified that Nina Reiser was a great mother who would never voluntarily abandon her children. That's crucial, because the 44-year-old operator of Namesys claims his wife, who was divorcing him, left Oakland for Russia, her native country, and left her children.

Nina Reiser, at age 31, was last seen Sept. 3, 2006, when she dropped off the couple's two young children to his residence in the Oakland hills for the Labor Day weekend. Hora told jurors the woman never left the house alive. (Key forensic evidence -- the woman's blood found on a pillar in that house -- was discounted after a police technician testified she could not be certain it was Nina Reiser's. However, the passenger seat of Hans Reiser's Honda CRX went missing after his wife vanished, and a sleeping bag case was found inside with the woman's blood on it.)

Defense attorney William DuBois has been working hard to seed doubts, to vilify Nina Reiser, to get the 12-member jury and three remaining alternates to believe she left the country and had planned to do so from the time the couple married in 1999 in a park outside of Oakland. DuBois has pounded away to jurors that she was a mail-order bride in Russia, that two men other than Hans Reiser had a key to her Oakland apartment following the breakup. She also had an affair with the defendant's best friend.

It's a rare opportunity to see and hear a murder defendant testify.

Click here for the liveblog.

Courtroom sketch by Wired's Norman Quebedeau.

Full post as published by Threat Level on March 03, 2008 (boomark / email).