thoughts on Reiser trial

The following gets flagged as "potential comment spam" by the comment vetter at http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2007/12/video-of-hans-r.html

I've been near a family whose mother was murdered and the body dumped in a creek five years ago. Until the body was finally discovered, the family kept hoping that their mother was alive somewhere; that she had just run off with some guy she met online and was happily living in Belize or something like that.

The "Nina is in Russia" defense looks to me like the same kind of denial.

Unless the defense has an evidence that she's in russia that is stronger than the evidence that she'd dead, the case appears to be

prosecution: she's dead
defense: she's in russia 

DuBois is supposed to be a good capital case tactician. I don't know about capital case tactics, but it seems to me that sticking to a story that is more implausible rather than less is a recipe for Hans getting to live out the rest of his span coding from a cell. Which might not be that bad for him. Linus Torvalds (or maybe it was his mother?) once said something in an interview to the effect that he would be happy to live in a closet as long as there was a computer there, but that was a long time ago before he became a father.

I would like to see the defense change their stance from "she's alive and in russia" to "I have no idea where she is either" and put some effort into tracking down the reasons Hans' father had for suggesting that the Russian mafia might have been the ones following him when was trying to evade surveillance.

Maybe this is being withheld because the russian mafia has threatened the kids?

maybe part of the tactics is not to posit things that are unknown because if something you have posited turns out to be demonstrably false that weakens you in an ad hominem kind of way.

"hans killed her" doesn't make sense from this distance; "nina is alive and in russia" seems equally unfounded.

On the other hand, someone from Philadelphia once pointed out to me that the propensity for wanting to free Mumia Abdul-Jamal is directly correlated to the distance the speaker lives from Philly. I don't know if this means that Mumia was guilty or that "everyone" in Philly are in denial about their complicity, but it was certainly effective in getting me to drop the topic from my short list of things to make smalltalk about with people from Philadelphia.

is the current defense tactic supposed to rely on the jury to connect the dots to posit their own, unfounded alternate theories?

What's a good link for a discussion of capital defense tactics? Lord only knows I have better things to do than stay current with this situation as it develops.

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