Facebook seems to have contributed to countless broken love affairs, divorces, and insane levels of jealousy. People pry into your friend lists and updates until they sometimes reach conclusions far beyond reality. How lovely, then, that a mere status update appears to have saved a Harlem man from jail.
According to The New York Times, Rodney Bradford decided to update his status with a call from the soul. "Where's my pancakes?" is the Times' translation of a status update it says was written in "indecipherable street slang." The fact that Bradford did this at 11:49 a.m. on October 17, using his father's computer, meant that he would not have to suffer pancakes of a more distasteful nature in the local penitentiary.
(Credit:
CC Slushpup/Flickr)
Bradford, you see, was arrested the next day for robbery. However, after he was booked, his lawyer was intelligent enough to update the district attorney with news of Bradford's Facebooking.
A subpoena was swiftly flung the way of the Zuckerbergville crew so that they might reveal whether the timing and location of the update were correct. They were, meaning Bradford could update his criminal status to "cleared."
There are some, however, who are not entirely convinced the charges should have been dropped. Joseph Pollini, a teacher at the Department of Law, Police Science and Criminal Justice Administration at John Jay College of Criminal Justice told the Times: "With a username and password, anyone can input data in a Facebook page."
He also offered a dire warning of the infinite dastardliness of people Bradford's age: "Some of the brightest people on the Internet are teenagers. They know the Internet better than a lot of people. Why? Because they use it all the time."
Oh, why is it so hard to give young people the benefit of the doubt--especially on Facebook?
Facebook may have 300 million members, but a news story this week makes one particular member stand out from the crowd.
Jonathan G. Parker, 19, of Fort Loudoun, Pa., is alleged to have burgled a house of two diamond rings. However, according to the Journal of West Virginia, Parker is alleged to have done something of a highly modern nature during this burglary.
For the victim, examining her computer after the burglary, noticed that her computer was logged into someone else's Facebook account. This might seem strange in itself. However, the person who logged on (perhaps to update his status to "feeling lucky today"?) also seems not to have logged off. That led intrepid sleuths to the figure of Parker, whose Facebook page it is indeed alleged, was the one that lay open.
Parker has been charged with one count of having an impressive and excessive ego. I'm sorry, that's not quite right. He has been charged with one count of felony daytime burglary.
It would be churlish to suggest that our obsession with networking socially will get us into trouble. However, after a Florida case in which a man allegedly stole a laptop in order to check his Facebook page, shouldn't we really consider whether the Facebook habit might be leading some to difficult and damaging behavior?
Edited 1.20pmPST to include quotes from Indiana BMV's Deputy Communications Director
Sometimes he was Eric Nicholson. Sometimes he was Vernon Eugene Lyons.
However, according to authorities in Indiana, his real name was George Helms and he assumed at least 10 different names in that state alone.
According to CBS2 Chicago, Helms walked into the Hobart, Ind., license branch to obtain an 11th ID. No one seems really sure why he would want an 11th license.
What Helms appears not to have known is that Indiana has invested in new facial recognition software.
Helms allegedly had all the correct paperwork and then posed for his photograph. However, in the evening after his application was approved, the photograph passed through the new facial recognition system, which spotted an allegedly remarkable similarity with 10 other licenses, according to the report.
In an email, the bureau's Graig Lubsen told CNET that normal procedure is that: "The next morning, our investigators will examine all of the potential facial recognition conflicts and determine if an investigation should proceed."
He added: "In Mr. Helms case, we had already distributed BMV 'Wanted' posters of Helms and a variety of other people to all 140 license branches and the employee recognized Helms from the poster."
The Bureau of Motor Vehicles claims that Helms got four licenses between July 2000 and October 2001. And eight more October 2008 to February 2009, according to the report.
As the investigation has continued, it has spread to Illinois, where authorities believe Helms secured at least 15 other IDs.
He has been charged with seven counts of forgery and is currently in jail.
The world weaves odd, strangely patterned webs.
Last September, a 14-year-old boy told police in Groningen, Holland, that he had been knocked off his bike and robbed of some money and his cell phone.
What evidence did he have of his alleged assailants? Very little.
Six months later, the Associated Press reports, he was pootling around on Google Street View when he saw an image of himself--and of two males behind him, who, he seemed to remember, were just in the place where he was allegedly robbed.
So he called the police again.
Paul Heidanus, a spokesman for the Groningen police, told the AP that the police had to make a formal request to Google in order to obtain the unblurred photo from Street View.
"The photo could provide an important contribution to solving a crime," he said.
The police subsequently arrested twin brothers, one of whom was allegedly recognized by Groningen's robbery squad.
But here's what I would love to know: what was the 14-year-old alleged victim doing on Google Street View six months after the alleged event? Why pick that moment to return to the scene of the alleged crime?
And, secondly, what was the kind and sensitive Street View driver doing at the time of the alleged incident? Did the driver really just miss it?
Correction 2:19 p.m. PDT: An earlier version of this story and its headline significantly mischaracterized a key metric used in the IC3 report. The overall finding of the report was that complaints regarding Internet-related crimes rose 33 percent in 2008.
Complaints of Internet-related crimes soared 33 percent last year, countering two years of consecutive declines, according to a report released Monday by the Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3).
The IC3 Web site received 275,284 complaints last year, up from 206,884 the previous year. The organization referred 72,940 of those 2008 complaints to federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies. The IC3 is a partnership among the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the National White Collar Crime Center, and the Bureau of Justice Assistance.
Referred complaints, which ranged from online auction fraud to identity theft to non-delivery of goods purchased online, cost consumers about $264.6 million last year, with the median dollar loss reaching $931 per complaint, according to the report. In 2007, the losses were less: $239.1 million.
(Credit:
Internet Crime Complaint Center)
(Credit:
Internet Crime Complaint Center)
As far as complaint categories of Internet crimes, non-delivered merchandise after sending a payment or delivering the goods but never receiving a payment, were at the top of the list, according to the report. Of all complaints received, 32.9 percent were related to this offense.
Internet auction fraud accounted for 25.5 percent of the complaints, while credit card and debit card fraud made up 9 percent, according to the report.
(Credit:
Internet Crime Complaint Center)
Even though complaints of crimes involving non-delivered goods occurred the most, that category didn't hit consumers in the pocketbook like check fraud, which carried a median loss of $3,000.
And the most common means to engage in an Internet crime was e-mail, the report noted. In 74 percent of the reported crimes, e-mail was used, followed by Web pages in nearly 29 percent of the cases.
Massachusetts police used cell phone tracing via GPS and Google Maps to track down a 9-year-old girl who was allegedly kidnapped by her grandmother, the Worcester Telegram & Gazette reported on Wednesday.
Police arrested the 52-year-old grandmother at a motel in Natural Bridge, Va., on Tuesday after she allegedly failed to return her granddaughter to the home of her legal guardians in Athol, Mass., the report said. The grandmother had picked up the child for a weekend visit on Saturday and allegedly threatened to not return her, according to the report.
With help from the cell phone provider, authorities were able to trace the location of the child's cell phone and followed the journey of the grandmother and granddaughter by using GPS coordinates that updated every time the phone was used.
They were able to track the phone to an intersection on Virginia Route 11 in Natural Bridge and then used Google Street View to view the intersection, where they saw a building with a red roof that looked like a motel. Then they searched on Google maps for motels in the town and located the Budget Inn-Natural Bridge and confirmed the location using Google's satellite view on the map, the report said.
The case is "an interesting first (at least as far as we're aware)," Pablo Chavez, Google senior policy counsel, wrote in a blog post.
The Google Street View of the Virginia motel where a missing Massachusetts girl was found with her grandmother.
(Credit: Google)
In the wild, wild west, when a poker player was caught cheating it was a capital offense, with the punishment quickly dispensed right across the card table. But today if you're caught cheating in the popular and lucrative world of Internet poker, you may get away scot-free.
At least that seems to be what is happening in the biggest scandal in the history of online gambling. A small group of people managed to cheat players out of more than $20 million.
And it would have gone undetected if it hadn't been for the players themselves, who used the Internet to root out the corruption. As a joint investigation by 60 Minutes and The Washington Post reveals, it raises new questions about the integrity and security of the shadowy and highly profitable industry that operates outside U.S. law.
Editors' note: Videos of the 60 Minutes segment are embedded below. The first is the full, 12 min., 53 sec. video. The five that follow are shorter excerpts. The text in this post is a transcript of the 60 Minutes segment. (For The Washington Post's full report, see "Inside Bet: Cracking the two biggest cheating scandals in the history of online poker.")
* * * * * * * *
If you had to pick the moment that the poker boom began, it was probably the day an unknown accountant named Chris Moneymaker won $2.5 million at the 2003 World Series of Poker.
Suddenly every amateur with a hat, sunglasses and a stack of chips saw themselves as the next big money maker. Nearly 7,000 competed in this year's tournament for $180 million in prize money. But the fever has spread far beyond Las Vegas.
It is the richest sporting competition in the world. And yet all this pales in comparison to the half million people who are playing on the Internet right now in the unregulated world of online poker.
As we learned in a tutorial, all you have to do to play is log on to the Web, click your way to an online gambling site, open an account with your credit card, choose your game and pull up a seat at a virtual table.
"These people could be playing from anywhere in the world. They could be here in the United States. They could be, you know, in India. They could be in South Africa," Australian computer security expert Michael Josem tells 60 Minutes correspondent Steve Kroft.
We should tell you that this $18 billion industry is illegal in the U.S., but the ban is almost impossible to enforce since the Internet sites and the computers that randomly deal the cards and keep track of the bets are located offshore, beyond the jurisdiction of U.S. law enforcement.
And unlike land-based casinos, there is almost no official regulation, enforcement or supervision. But it hasn't stopped thousands of mostly young men from making this their livelihood. Todd Witteles, a former computer scientist-turned-poker pro, says you no longer have to go to Vegas to find a high stakes game.
"You could do it from your own living room," he says. "You don't have to get dressed. You don't have to anything. It's right there on your computer."
Witteles says online poker is much different - faster, more aggressive and less personal.
"You're not lookin' at somebody sittin' across the table. You're just playing the cards that tumble out of the computer," Kroft remarks.
"Not only are you not looking at your opponents, you're not looking at the cards being dealt, you're not looking at who's dealing them to you. So, you don't know if the whole thing is legitimate, even if all the players sitting with you are just as legitimate as you are. Maybe the whole game isn't," Witteles says.
And as Witteles found out, it wasn't, at least on a popular Internet site called "Absolute Poker." His suspicions were first aroused in a high stakes game of Texas Hold 'Em, against what he thought was an incompetent, and lucky, amateur using the screen name "Grey Cat."
"This Grey Cat person was new. And at first, he seemed like a live one. He seemed terrible," Witteles remembers. "He seemed to play crazy. It seemed like he was giving his money away. Except the only thing was, he wasn't losing. He was playing in a style that was sure to lose, but he was killing the game day after day."
While Witteles was losing $15,000 to the apparent novice, other high stakes players began to notice improbable and endless winning streaks on Absolute Poker's sister site, "Ultimate Bet."
David Paredes, a Harvard grad who has made enough money playing poker to pay off his law school loan and live in an expensive New York apartment, got fleeced by a player called "Nio Nio."
Asked how much he lost, Paredes tells Kroft, "I'm probably down somewhere in the range of $70,000 to that particular player."
Paredes says there were other players who lost higher sums. "In the range of $250,000, $90,000, $70,000, $210,000."
Tracking old hands via software
Serge Ravitch, another lawyer-turned-poker pro, began using a software program called "Poker Tracker" to review thousands of old hands.
"What I saw did not make any sense," he remembers. "This account was simply winning too much money for the type of game that he was playing. And he was doing it by never having the worst hand. When the other person was bluffing, he would always go all in. When the other person had some kind of made hand, he would always fold."
Ravitch says it was like he knew what everybody's cards were.
"If you can see everybody's cards in poker, you could be the worst poker player in the world, up against the best poker player in the world, and you're gonna beat him just about every time," Witteles says.
Soon, the Internet poker forums, chat rooms and blogs were atwitter with fresh reports about suspect players. And when Absolute Poker and Ultimate Bet failed to respond to complaints, the online poker community undertook its own investigation.
"We knew for sure there was cheating going on. We just didn't know who was responsible yet," Witteles says.
The most likely explanation seemed to be that someone had gotten access to an administrative or security account at Absolute Poker and Ultimate Bet that would have allowed them to see all of the cards in the game as they were being played.
"Somebody with access to a server, a computer server that would give that information to them in real time?" Kroft asks.
"Yes," Ravitch says.
"So either a really good hacker or somebody on the inside?" Kroft asks.
"Exactly," he replies.
Late last year, the poker sleuths got lucky. When one of the players requested the hand histories of a suspected cheater known as "Potripper," someone at Absolute Poker inadvertently sent them an Excel spreadsheet with 65,000 lines of data that include all of the cards that had been played in thousands of games against hundreds of Potripper's opponents.
It allowed Michael Josem to recreate some of the hands, as the cheater would have seen them, in and turn them into a video that he posted online, along with a statistical analysis of the cheater's win rate.
"We have here a whole lot of people in the middle, which is pretty normal, they lose a little, they win a bit. A few people got lucky for a bit, a few people were losing a lot of money. Right up here, in the very top right hand corner, we have the cheater," he explains. "We did the mathematical analysis to find that they were winning at about 15 standard deviations above the mean, which is approximately equivalent to winning a one-in-a-million jackpot six consecutive times."
"Now, this sort of stuff just doesn't happen in the real world," he adds.
But more importantly, the Excel spreadsheet also listed the user account and the IP address of the suspected cheater, which the sleuths traced to the computer modem of an Absolute Poker employee.
The company, which is headquartered in a shopping mall in Costa Rica, was finally forced to acknowledge that a former employee had cracked their software code and cheated online players by looking at their cards.
But what really made the victims angry was that Absolute Poker cut a deal with the cheater to protect his identity, in exchange for a full confession of how he did it.
"Here, these people stole millions of dollars from their customers, from their best customers, from the high-limit players of the site, and in the official report released about what happened, not only did nobody get into any kind of legal trouble, their names weren't even publicized," Witteles says.
The Canadian connection
But in the murky world of Internet poker there was precious little the players could do about it. The companies were located in Costa Rica, and they couldn't really complain to U.S. authorities because online gambling is illegal. The only pretense of supervision--and the players only hope--lay with a tiny nation thousands of miles to the north that hardly anyone had ever heard of.
The virtual poker games are actually run on computers servers from a Canadian Indian reservation outside of Montreal. It's all licensed by the sovereign tribe of the Mohawk nation, which has no experience in casino gambling and doesn't have to answer to Canadian authorities.
The grand chief is Mike Delisle.
Chief Delisle says Internet gambling is illegal in Canada, but tells Kroft, "We're not Canadians. We're a member of the Haudenosaunee Five Nation Confederacy. And we're Mohawk Kahnawake people. We're not Canadian."
And that legal distinction has allowed the Kahnawakes to rake in millions of dollars a year by licensing Internet gaming sites and housing their computer servers on the reservation. They now register and service more than 60 percent of the world's Internet gaming activity from a highly protected and nondescript building that used to be a mattress factory. 60 Minutes drove by the former factory with The Washington Post's Gil Gaul.
"This is nondescript," Gaul remarks.
"This takes nondescript to an entirely different level," Kroft comments.
The operation is overseen by the Kahnawake Gaming Commission, whose three commissioners meet in secret. The commission is independent of tribal leaders, including Chief Delisle, and its investigation of Absolute Poker and Ultimate Bet have been neither transparent nor particularly aggressive.
A lot of the players who were cheated suspect it's because the owner of the discredited sites is Joe Norton, a former grand chief of the Kahnawakes, who helped establish the gaming commission that cleared him of any wrongdoing in the scandal.
The commission fined the two sites a total of $2 million, ordered them to repay the losses to players who were cheated, but Absolute Poker and Ultimate Bet are still in business.
"Here you had a gaming commission. It was originally set up by Joe Norton. And his two companies come before the board and they get a slap on the wrist," Kroft tells Delisle.
"Well, I don't think it's a slap on the wrist," Delisle replies. "We are comfortable in saying that through the gaming commission, they have done the investigation, saying that he didn't have a part in the cheating scandal."
Asked why the commission didn't suspend his license, Delisle says, "Well, they were afraid that if that was happened and the rug was pulled out from under them, so to speak, that the players wouldn't be paid."
Neither the gaming commission nor Joe Norton would talk to us, but in a statement the companies said they were victimized by insiders and former employees and accepted blame for overlooking the security problems with its software.
The only clarity in the investigation was provided by Frank Catania, a former director of New Jersey's Gaming Enforcement Division, who was hired by the tribe to look into the cheating that the players themselves helped expose.
"We owe it to the players themselves for finding this out," he says.
Catania found that the scam at Ultimate Bet went on for four years, and says the mastermind appears to have been a former giant in the world of poker.
No charges filed
Asked if he knows who did the cheating, Catania says, "Well, the one name has already been released by the Kahnawake Gaming Commission. That's a fellow by the name of Russ Hamilton."
Hamilton is a former champion at the World Series of Poker.
In 1994, Russ Hamilton won $1 million and his weight in silver for winning the main event at the World Series of Poker.
According to the gaming commission, Hamilton and five unnamed conspirators used multiple screen names and accounts to cheat online players out of more than $20 million. And so far they seem to be getting away with it. Because of jurisdictional issues, no criminal charges have been filed, and no one even seems to be conducting a criminal investigation.
"We're willing to work in collaboration with anyone who wants to bring these people to justice," Delisle says.
"In this case, you have somebody who you know was cheating. It's like the person's gotten away with it," Kroft says.
"I believe that anyone else, named or not, will be brought to justice," Delisle says. "If they can be found. That's really the defining factor."
But we didn't have that much trouble locating Hamilton. He seems to be holed up at his home in Las Vegas behind the security gates of an exclusive golfing community.
Last week, we called his house and were told by a woman that answered the phone that he would be back in a little while. We left a message, but he hasn't returned the call.
"If you hadn't investigated this on your own, you think it'd still be going on?" Kroft asks Witteles.
"I'm sure it would be going on," Witteles says. "The people who did this were very greedy and very blatant. But the scary thing is there may be other accounts out there like this, maybe even on other sites that are not being done with the same sort of recklessness. And maybe this has been going on, on more than just Absolute Poker and Ultimate Bet. Maybe it's going on in several other places. And maybe it's even still going on in these sites."
"I'm sure there're people out there right now figuring out, 'Here's a way we can do it again,'" Catania says.
Produced by Ira Rosen.
Here's an old photo of Hans Reiser from his Stanford days. A San Francisco Chronicle reporter said at his sentencing Friday, however, Reiser's hair was grown out and he looked more like Art Garfunkel.
(Credit: via Stanford University)
In what appears the final chapter of the Hans Reiser crime saga, the Linux programmer convicted of killing his wife was sentenced Friday afternoon to 15 years to life in prison under a deal he worked out with prosecutors in exchange for leading police to his victim's body.
Reiser--known to the technology world as the founder of the ReiserFS file system software--was found guilty in April of first-degree murder in the 2006 killing of his wife, with whom he was undergoing a bitter divorce. The jury convicted him largely on circumstantial evidence and despite the fact that Nina Reiser's body hadn't been found before trial.
First-degree murder carries a sentence of 25 years to life, compared with 15 years to life for second-degree murder. But in anticipation of his sentencing, Reiser, 44, brokered a deal with prosecutors that went generally like so: If he brought police to his wife's body and he gave up his appellate rights, he could plead guilty to second-degree murder and get 15 years.
And that's what happened in an Oakland, Calif., courthouse Friday, after Reiser pleaded guilty to second-degree murder, according to media reports. He'll be eligible for parole in about 13 years, having already served two years since his October 2006 arrest.
Throughout the drama-filled six-month trial, Reiser maintained his innocence. Arguing the so-called geek defense, his attorney said that while Reiser may be strange, arrogant, even abnormal, his odd behavior following Nina's disappearance wasn't evidence of murder. On trial, Reiser smeared the mother of his two children, alleging, among other things, that she was likely hiding out in her native Russia with money she stole from his now defunct company, Namesys.
Nina Reiser's remains were found in Oakland's Redwood Regional Park, about a half a mile from where she was last seen. Click image for full map.
(Credit: Google)Reiser, handcuffed to his attorney, did in fact bring authorities to a grave site Monday containing his wife's remains in a heavily brushed, secluded area about 40 yards off a road in Oakland's Redwood Regional Park. The grave site was located about a half mile from where Nina was last seen in 2006 at Reiser's mother's house, where he was living.
It's unclear whether the cause of death was ever determined through an autopsy. But Wired reported that after the sentencing, prosecutor Paul Hora revealed some of the details from Reiser's confession. Reiser first punched Nina in the mouth, then strangled her to death, Hora said. Hora added that Reiser "stored the body in the bathroom, then moved it to his car, where it stayed for two days while he searched for a place to bury her," according to Wired.
Wired's David Kravets added that before he was formally sentenced, Reiser vowed to make up to society for what he had done and said he was putting Namesys and ReiserFS into a trust fund for his children. Reiser added that he hoped to earn money for his kids while in prison, assuming he's "able to get access to a computer and the Internet," according to Kravets.
Pop quiz: do you feel more or less secure with the arrival of Google Maps and other online mapping services?
News.com Poll
I ran into that question when I got two very different news releases Monday. One argued that Google Maps helps awful people find you, but the other argued Google Maps helps you find awful people.
The first was from an outfit called Stop Child Predators, which launched a campaign to tell parents about the potential ills of Google Maps' Street View, which shows driver's-eye views of countless neighborhoods.
"This technology shows anyone in the world our communities, and exposes not only the routes from the bus stops to homes, but our children, without ever stepping foot in our neighborhoods," said Stacie Rumenap, the executive director of Stop Child Predators, in a statement.
On the other side was the announcement of CriminalSearches.com, a new service from PeopleFinders.com that said it shows where "sex offenders...thieves, violent offenders, murderers, or con artists" live in your neighborhood. The site shows people icons on a Google map; clicking an icon shows a person's photo, description, address, and criminal history.
"In a society where personal safety has become an important concern, CriminalSearches.com provides useful information that will help families feel secure in their neighborhoods and personal lives," PeopleFinders.com said, with President Bryce Lane adding, "We created CriminalSearches.com to help consumers make the most educated decisions about the people they let into their personal lives and the lives of their loved ones."
So what's the verdict? Do online maps creep you out? Or do you feel safer because they enable you to keep an eye out for threats?
Vote in the poll, and share your thoughts in the feedback section below.
PeopleFinders.com said its CriminalSearches.com site lets you scope neighborhoods for people with a criminal history.
(Credit: CriminalSearches.com)OAKLAND, Calif.--The body that Linux programmer Hans Reiser led police to Monday has been positively identified as his estranged wife Nina Reiser, whom he is convicted of killing, police revealed at a press conference here Tuesday afternoon.
That development not only brings some closure to family and friends of Nina Reiser, but also brings Hans Reiser one step closer to a reduced sentence as part of a deal in the works with the prosecution that would still need a judge's approval, according to Alameda County Deputy District Attorney Paul Hora.
Reiser--known to the technology world as the founder of the ReiserFS file system software--was found guilty in April of first-degree murder in the 2006 killing of his wife, with whom he was undergoing a bitter divorce. The jury convicted him largely on circumstantial evidence and despite the fact that Nina Reiser's body hadn't been found before trial.
Hans Reiser
(Credit: via Stanford University)Throughout the drama-filled six-month trial, Reiser maintained his innocence. Arguing the so-called geek defense, his attorney said that while Reiser may be strange, arrogant, even abnormal, his odd behavior following Nina's disappearance wasn't evidence of murder. On trial, Reiser smeared the mother of his two children, alleging, among other things, that she was likely hiding out in her native Russia with money she stole from his now defunct company, Namesys.
Reiser was scheduled to be sentenced Wednesday. But in the meantime, his attorneys had contacted the prosecution with interest in brokering a deal. Under such an agreement, Hora said, Reiser would bring authorities to Nina's body, waive his right to an appeal, and adhere to other conditions not made public, in exchange for a plea to second-degree murder. First-degree murder carries a sentence of 25 years to life, compared with 15 years to life for second-degree murder.
Reiser, handcuffed to his attorney, did in fact bring authorities to a grave site Monday containing his wife's remains in a heavily brushed, secluded area about 40 yards off a road in Oakland's Redwood Regional Park. The grave site was located about a half mile from where Nina was last seen in 2006 at Reiser's mother's house, where he was living.
Nina Reiser's remains were found in Oakland's Redwood Regional Park, about a half a mile from where she was last seen. Click image for full map.
(Credit: Google)Without Reiser directing authorities, "we never would have found" her, said Oakland police homicide commander Ersie Joyner III. The cause of death has not yet been determined, Joyner added. However The San Francisco Chronicle reported Monday, citing a source familiar with the investigation, that Reiser said he had strangled Nina. Of course, Reiser said a lot of things that weren't true.
Hora emphasized that the deal "wouldn't have happened without the support and desire of Nina's family."
"Now the family gets to pick the burial site, not the defendant, and that's important," Hora said.
The prosecutor disagreed that the deal sends a message to defendants that lying under oath could get them lesser sentences. In this case, he said, "it was the right thing to do."
Given this week's developments, attorneys on both sides of the case plan to ask the judge for sentencing to be continued from Wednesday to a later, undetermined date, Hora said.
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