Go Hawaii!

 

Wookie Kim, legal director of the ACLU of Hawaii, which filed an amicus brief in the case, told Bolts that the court’s decision “ensures fundamental fairness and integrity in the criminal legal system, and more specifically it ensures that people aren’t wrongfully convicted because of inaccurate or misleading testimony by officers about what happened in an interrogation room or during an interrogation.”

  Bolts

Wookie Kim.

Across the country, 31 states already have some requirements that police record interrogations, according to a review conducted by Duke Law School, though many only require recordings for some types of cases, such as homicides. Hawaii is the ninth state to impose this requirement regardless of the crime someone is suspected of.

[...]

But the court didn’t rely on the U.S. Constitution in arriving at its decision—instead, it relied exclusively on the Hawaii Constitution, which contains similar language.

Justice Todd Eddins, who authored the majority opinion, took pains to spell out that this was intentional, writing, “No United States Supreme Court opinion has tackled the recording of custodial interrogations. If a case did though, we would still look to our state constitution first.”

[...]

The Hawaii Constitution’s due process clause “offers safety to Hawaii’s people that exceeds the federal constitution’s suddenly fluid protections,” Eddins writes.

He makes no mystery of the sort of cases he has in mind, describing the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs, which overturned the constitutional right to an abortion in 2022, as “erasing a generations-long constitutional right, stripping autonomy from half the population, and empowering states to force birth.”

[...]

“In this day and age where federal constitutional rights are being eviscerated or evaporated, it’s important that state supreme courts protect people’s rights, relying on the state constitution, and this is an example of that,” Kim said.

[...]

Earlier this month, when the Hawaii Supreme Court said the state couldn’t force a plot of land to be used for religious purposes because that violated the state constitution’s “Establishment Clause,” Eddins penned a concurrence to denounce “the Roberts Court” for eroding the separation between Church and State at the federal level.

[...]

“The Roberts Court casually dismisses the lessons of American and world history, the warnings of prominent early Americans, and the judiciary’s storied legal minds. Bad things happen unless government and religion are completely separated.”

[...]

Eddins drew national attention, and conservative criticism, last year with another decision he authored that upheld a ban on carrying a loaded pistol. In that case, his opinion directly rebuked the U.S. Supreme Court’s approach to the Second Amendment. “The spirit of Aloha clashes with a federally-mandated lifestyle that lets citizens walk around with deadly weapons during day-to-day activities,” Eddins wrote.

[...]

In last week’s decision on [a case involving] police interrogations, Eddins again made it clear that he was looking for alternatives to originalism.

“A constitution adapts,” he wrote. “Due process is agile… Due process matures with technological developments to protect constitutional rights.”

Two of Eddins’ colleagues on this five-member court, Sabrina McKenna and Vladimir Devens, joined his opinion. Devens is a former police officer who worked in the Honolulu Police Department.

[...]

Justice Lisa Ginoza dissented, arguing that recording interrogations “is not a matter of constitutional dimension.” She criticized the majority for requiring recordings “without actual information about the ability of law enforcement to meet the majority’s new mandates.”

She called for “input from key stakeholders—including law enforcement, the attorney general, prosecutors, the public defender, and others—because there is too much this court does not know about the on-the-ground ability and resources to effectuate this new rule.” (The court’s fifth member, Chief Justice Mark Recktenwald, split the difference, agreeing with the majority in part while also filing a partial dissent.)

Like every officer doesn't have a smart phone with a recording app.

Wookie Kim

Oh, yeah, his parents were original Star Wars fans.