Mar 21, 2008

Judge warns Reiser about his attitude

Bay City News

Seven days of rambling and sometimes non-responsive testimony by Oakland computer engineer Hans Reiser prompted the judge in his murder trial Thursday to warn him about his attitude and order him to give direct answers.

When Reiser, 44, who is accused of murdering his estranged wife Nina, didn’t give a direct answer to a question posed by prosecutor Paul Hora, Alameda County Superior Court Judge Larry Goodman abruptly stopped his testimony at 11:50 a.m. and called the attorneys in the case into his chambers.

When they emerged several minutes later, Goodman told jurors that their lunch break would begin early so that “counsel can confer with Mr. Reiser.”

After jurors left the courtroom, Goodman stared at Reiser, who was sitting on the witness stand a few feet away from him, and said, “Mr. Reiser, your attitude is disrespectful and condescending and I will no longer tolerate it.”

The judge told Reiser, “You’re not in a position to control the courtroom and the actions of your counsel (his defense attorney). I urge you most strongly to follow his advice.”

Goodman then instructed defense attorney William DuBois to speak to Reiser over the lunch hour.

After the trial resumed at 2 p.m., Reiser appeared to have a better attitude and gave straightforward yes or no answers to several questions.

But by the end of the afternoon he returned to his pattern of giving lengthy answers to simple questions and refused to answer some of Hora’s questions, saying they were flawed.

Referring to Goodman’s order that he give direct answers, Reiser complained that, “These rules are hard to understand” and “these orders from the court are really peculiar.”

Reiser will return to the witness stand for an eighth day of testimony when his trial resumes on April 1. The trial, which began on Nov. 6, will be in recess next week because several jurors planned vacations for that period based on Goodman’s initial estimate that the trial would be over by mid-January.

Nina Reiser was last seen alive on Sept. 3, 2006, when she dropped off the couple’s children at the house where Hans Reiser lived with his mother.

Nina and Hans met in Russia, where she was born and trained as a physician, and where he often spent time doing business for his file system company. They married in 1999, but she filed for divorce in 2004 and was awarded legal custody of their children, although he had visitation rights.

Even though Nina’s body has never been found, in October of 2006 Hans Reiser was charged with murdering her because prosecutors believe that DNA and blood evidence proves that he killed her.

He has pleaded not guilty to the charges against him.

Reiser began his testimony on March 3 and first was questioned by DuBois for four-and-a-half days and has now been cross-examined by Hora for two-and-a-half days. Hora will resume his cross-examination when the trial resumes and then DuBois will get another chance to ask questions.

Hora and Reiser have clashed at times over what the prosecutor believes is Reiser’s refusal to give simple answers to straight-forward questions, but DuBois also expressed displeasure with many of Reiser’s responses.

DuBois often told Reiser that some questions could be answered by a simple yes or no and on other occasions told Reiser to limit his responses to “25 words or less.”

In his cross-examination today, Hora got Reiser to admit that one of the reasons he considered renting a storage locker in Manteca or Stockton two weeks after Nina disappeared is that he wanted to hide his car from Oakland police.

Reiser also admitted that he removed two hard drives from one of his computers shortly after Nina disappeared, probably on Sept. 7, 2006, and gave them to DuBois.

Reiser said no one has ever asked him for the two hard drives, but Hora showed him a search warrant signed by a judge on Sept. 13, 2006, that allowed Oakland police to seize Reiser’s computer equipment, including hard drives.

Reiser still insisted that, “I’ve never been advised that I had to turn over my hard drives to the government, to this date” and told Hora that the hard drives probably would now be turned over to him by DuBois, as he assumed that DuBois still has them.

But Hora thundered, “What good are they now?”

Reiser said he only called Nina’s cell phone once after she disappeared and even that call was only a seven-second call in which he didn’t leave a message.

Reiser said he called Nina’s phone shortly after 5 p.m. on Sept. 5, 2006, to see if she had picked up their children at school, as it was her turn to pick them up that day.

He said a child care center connected to the school left him a message that afternoon saying that Nina’s best friend, Ellen Doren, planned to pick up the children that day, but he didn’t do much to find out why that was the case.

When Hora asked Reiser why he didn’t try calling Nina a second time to make sure the children were being taken care of, Reiser said, “Because I just didn’t care about it that much and I’m an inconsiderate a--hole.”