Hans Reiser and the Asperger’s Defense: Troubling
July 9, 2008 by Kristina Chew, PhD
Filed under Health
I’ve been following the trial of Hans Reiser, the software engineer who developed code for the Linux operating system and who, in April, was convicted of first-degree murder in the 2006 disappearance of his ex-wife, Nina Reiser. The case has been troubling to me on a few levels: They lived in the Oakland Hills — a place I’m familiar with — and where, six days after she disappeared, Nina Reiser’s minivan was found containing her purse and $144 in rotting groceries. Yesterday, Hans Reiser led police to what he said was the body of Nina Reiser, buried in a park in the Oakland Hills; according to the July 7th SFGate, he “agreed to reveal the location of her body in exchange for a deal in which he would be sentenced for second-degree murder rather than the first-degree murder conviction a jury returned against him in April.”
Also troubling about Hans Reiser’s trial was how his attorneys argued that his having Asperger’s syndrome rendered him “‘mentally incompetent as a result of a mental disorder or developmental disability.’” From the July 1st Wired.com:
As trial was set to begin in November, [Hans Reiser's] attorneys told reporters their client was a mental genius who has remembered thousands of pages of court records for his upcoming murder trial.
Later on, as part of what became known as the “geek defense,” his lawyers decried the Linux developer in front of jurors as being so socially inept that any guilt-ridden behavior he displayed following his wife’s 2006 disappearance wasn’t because he committed murder. He threw away his car seat, tried to hide the car, hosed down the car’s inside and engaged in counter-surveillance moves because he couldn’t understand social cues, they said.
Jurors often rolled their eyes in disbelief, especially when the defendant took the stand for 11 days.
At one point during the sixth-month trial, DuBois suggested the defendant suffered from Asperger’s, a mild form of autism. In closing arguments, they likened him to a duckbill platypus.
Dan Horowitz, a California criminal defense attorney who briefly was Reiser’s defense attorney before trial, suggested [defense attorney William] DuBois is “unable to get his client to function in a way to allow Dubois to prepare for sentencing or other motions to get a lighter sentence.”
Even though Reiser has already been convicted, the sentencing stage of a case is important, Horowitz said. Among other things, Horowitz suggested that Reiser, if he’s mentally incompetent, might be incapable of assisting in negotiations to turn over the body in exchange for a lighter term, or of assisting DuBois in challenging the conviction.
“If he can get Hans Reiser to be found nuts, or if he can get Hans Reiser to be found almost nuts, he can be put in a psychological setting, instead of prison. That’s better,” Horowitz said.
The whole case is plenty troubling on its own. But seeing Asperger’s so readily equated with being “mentally incompetent” or having a “mental disorder” or being “nuts” is incredibly troubling. (And what’s going on with that business about the “duckbill platypus”?)
This is really troubling, indeed. Asperger’s (or autism) does not render one mentally incompetent, especially not someone that is a Linux core code writer. It is pathetic what he is doing and it is potentially really, really harmful to the autistic community. I hope he gets the sentence he deserves.
When I heard Dr. Temple Grandin speak she mentioned a man with Asperger’s who was bomb making (experimenting) in his bsmt and the FBI came and put him in a mental facility b/c truly they didn’t know what else to do.
His Mom wanted her to get him out.
Her reply “Society has rules. Everyone needs to learn those rules and follow them, including those of us with Autism.” No, she wouldn’t help.
If he was that socially inept, he wouldn’t be able to hold a job, get married and figure out how not only to kill his wife but attempt to protect himself. It was no accident and deserves his sentence in jail. If he was that socially inept and it was an accident… then he deserves his sentence in a mental hospital.
But then again, I get annoyed everytime someone buys the “but I was drunk, I didn’t mean to rape her” plea.
Just b/c one’s ability to comprehend society’s rules may be less than someone elses doesn’t mean that society doesn’t have the right to be protected from you if you commit a crime. Whether it be a mental hospital or jail. Which is why I work so hard on teaching social and behavioural skills with my boys.
S.
ARG! I agree, farmwife.
These defense attorneys do whatever it takes to get their client off without regard to what it does to others or how it affects society.
That being said, I wonder at people like my son and what’s going to happen to kids who can walk and talk but not “get” that when someone dares you do do something stupid, YOU’RE the one who gets into trouble. Not rape and murder, mind you, but silly things like, go kiss that girl because I dare you. Or tell the teacher that class is boring. There *is* a disability there, and a “not getting it” going on. And I’d like a little understanding from teachers and others. BUT I’m not excusing the behaviour.
G WILL have a hard time holding down a job and that sort of thing because of his lack of understanding social cues, etc. I would hate to think that cases like this make people frightened of autistic people instead of just thinking of their development as being less nuanced in that area and focusing on their STRENGTHS.
Sorry such a long comment.
All I can say is, “Oh, Please!” and roll my eyes in disdain over these lawyers…
It irratates me as much as the Etwhistle case.
Cuh-reeeepeeeee. Creepy.
I’m glad the jury members are rolling their eyes.
Our sons don’t get away with ANYTHING because of autism. They are expected to follow rules just like everyone else, and if they don’t, they get the consequences. It’s disgusting to see this cynically used as a “defense.”
“That being said, I wonder at people like my son and what’s going to happen to kids who can walk and talk but not “get” that when someone dares you do do something stupid, YOU’RE the one who gets into trouble. Not rape and murder, mind you, but silly things like, go kiss that girl because I dare you. Or tell the teacher that class is boring. There *is* a disability there, and a “not getting it” going on. And I’d like a little understanding from teachers and others. BUT I’m not excusing the behaviour. ”
Mrs. C…we worry about exactly the same things. We caution TH often about how to manage these kinds of situations.
People with Asperger’s can learn social skills. It doesn’t come naturally, but these can be taught. I cringe at the idea of my delightful but quirky teen being called a “duck-bill platypus.”
AUGH! I just read one of those articles.
First of all, What’s wrong with duckbill platypuses? They are cute. I love them.
Look how cute that is- http://www.creationscience.com/onlinebook/webpictures/platypus.jpg
And second, people with asperger’s syndrome do too have emotions! URG!
Even VULCANS have emotions. gah!
How annoying on multiple levels.
Count me amongst those pulling their hair out with frustration over this. Crap like this only increases autism backlash within the community. Just what we need.
If I’m reading the article correctly, Reiser’s “AS” is just speculation on behalf of the defense attorney, which is doubly irresponsible of course. Good on the jury for not buying into this. Admittedly, the poor execution on the part of the defense team made the whole thing seem pretty ludicrous. I hope other juries will do the same if another defense attorney tries the ploy in a more competent manner.
I think there are some genuine criminal justice issues for those with PDDs.
Was it established that Mr. Reiser was diagnosed or was that more speculative and ad hoc for the purposes of the trial?
I would hate to see Asperger’s Syndrome hijacked as a disingenuous “Twinkie Defense” of this century, not only because it potentially creates a false impression of the great majority of the group as sociopaths or not to be trusted, but runs the risk of making a joke of a legitimate defense when that might be relevant.
I’m not a lawyer, but it seems to me that a lot of the commentary is confusing two completely separate legal issues:
1) Does the defendant’s mental condition render him not responsible for any crimes he committed? That’s the insanity defense, which is rarely used and even more rarely successful. It’s not an issue in this case.
2) Is the defendant mentally capable of properly defending himself (which includes sentencing negotiations) in his trial? Here the issue is not whether or not the defendant is responsible for his acts, but whether he can get a fair trial. Normally in a murder case, an incompetent defendant would be held in a secure hospital until such time as he became competent, at which point he’d be tried. That’s the issue at hand.
The issue here seems to be whether Reiser can argue that behavior that most people would think indicated, say, lack of remorse may be due to his neurology rather than his actual state of mind. Nobody’s arguing that he isn’t responsible for the killing.
Ebohlman,
Thanks for pointing out the difference. I’ll admit that I jumped to a conclusion.
More from Reiser about his innocence—–I had thought about posting about his trial earlier and was not sure how to write about it. Then when I read about him showing police Nina Reiser’s body—-wow. I’d been struck by his seemingly deep insistence on why the car with the missing front seat was in the state it was in—–by so many rationalizations, as it were.
Not a fair comparison for the platypus, I guess.
Oh good grief. I’d be rolling my eyes too if I were on the jury. That’s so stupid, and the S&M thing is stupid too.
And being a geek doesn’t make a person autistic. I’ve known very non-autistic but very sociopathic geeks before (it’s a bad combination in assorted geeky communities when there are autistic geeks to exploit, too, as I learned the hard way… hmm), and frankly most geeks I’ve known were not autistic. (Some were neurologically atypical in other ways, some weren’t, and there were more autistic people than usual, but certainly not more autistic people than there were non-autistic people.)
I’m having a conversation with someone else here, and she just pointed out something as well — there’s a huge difference between someone exploiting an autistic person’s vulnerabilities in order to get them to commit a crime they don’t understand, and an autistic person committing a premeditated crime.
The analogy I was just given, is handing a blind person a blackmail letter that they couldn’t see, and telling them to give it to some particular person, while they were unaware of the content.
The two things should not be equated, and when autistic people do something wrong because of exploitation, it’s the exploiters who should get sentenced, just the same as they ought to in any other context.
There are terrorists who use cognitively disabled people as suicide bombers without telling them what’s going to happen, after all. If by some chance someone actually survived that, I hope someone wouldn’t put them in an institution for the rest of their life on the off-chance that another terrorist would snatch them up and do the same thing.
I don’t like to see conversations about people like this guy — who is obviously guilty of a premeditated act — getting diverted into “Whenever autistic people do something wrong, they ought to be locked up, no matter what the context is, because we don’t want to give the impression that autistic people ever get into situations where someone cons them into doing something awful, because that would somehow mean none of us are ever responsible.”
That’s just black and white thinking and not useful at all.
“I’m having a conversation with someone else here, and she just pointed out something as well — there’s a huge difference between someone exploiting an autistic person’s vulnerabilities in order to get them to commit a crime they don’t understand, and an autistic person committing a premeditated crime.”
This is an excellent observation and so true.
A coworker of mine (placed in the job by Alpha Autism, which is a pretty awesome Australian autism support group for adults) consistently used his Asperger’s diagnosis as an excuse, up to and including sexual harassment. None of us, his coworkers, ever brought it up for fear of being labelled as intolerant (though we had a range of physical and mental disabilities among us, including a few people also placed with Alpha Autism) and punished. I can definitely see how defense lawyers would want to use this on a larger scale.
Society’s rules still apply, whether you understand WHY they apply or not.