Hans Reiser Guilty of First Degree Murder

[Mike Oliver]

Quoting Christopher Browne <cbbrowne-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org>:

> On Tue, Apr 29, 2008 at 8:11 PM, Ansar Mohammed <ansarm-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org> wrote:
>> http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/04/reiser-guilty-o.html
>>
>> OAKLAND, California -- Jurors found Linux programmer Hans Reiser guilty of
>> first degree murder on Monday, concluding he killed his estranged wife in
>> 2006. The verdict followed a nearly six-month trial and nearly three days of
>> deliberation
>
> I hate to be a "semantics nazi," but I find it fairly typical that the
> title says "Hans Reiser Guilty" when what happened was "Hans Reiser
> *FOUND* Guilty," which has the not-so-fine distinction that the former
> implies a more-or-less absolute truth whilst the latter includes some
> recognition of the fallibility of human choice.

Yeah, this seems to be standard journalistic shorthand, but it bugs
me too a little bit.  On the other hand it could be defended as saying
that he is now guilty in the eyes of the law, which is a different
thing (though, one hopes, strongly correlated) with being factually guilty.

My personal peeve with journalists, particularly TV journalists, along
these lines, is when they use the word "suspect" to mean "perpetrator",
in sentences like "police don't know who the suspect is".  No, the police
don't *have* a suspect; the person who actually did it is not a suspect,
because the police don't know who he is.  It strikes me as a dangerous
usage, because it could blur the distinction between "suspect" and
"perpetrator", making people think that those identified as "suspects"
are probably guilty.

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