Hans Reiser charged with murder

[Chong Yu Meng]

On Tue, 2007-03-13 at 11:12 -0400, Kurt Wall wrote:
> Spare me the posturing. Strictly speaking, OJ is both not guilty (because he
> was found do during his criminal trial) and guilty (because he was found
> liable at his civil trial). You can believe he's innocent if you want, 
> but "not guilty" just means there wasn't sufficient evidence to find him 
> guilty. In Reiser's case, I'm just behaving like an ignorant rube and 
> offering an opinion based on the circumstantial evidence we've seen.

I thought it was one of the founding fathers of the US who said that he
would rather a lot of guilty men go free than for one innocent man be
convicted of a crime he did not commit? When I read American history
many years ago (no, it was not a school subject, just one of the things
that fascinated me), I was impressed by the commitment to reason and
fair play. 

When I visited the US in the early 1990's, one of my hosts described the
judicial system there as being over-lenient -- this was about the same
time as the Michael Fay incident (for those who do not remember, he was
the American teen who was caned in Singapore for vandalism), and an
elderly couple next to me on the flight to Arizona commented that
Michael's punishment was well-deserved. 

Actually, in Hans' case, I am more inclined to Ric's view, that he
should probably have just walked away from whatever situation was
upsetting him so much. It's just not worth it, and such a waste of
intelligence!

pascal chong