Honor Killing by David E. Stannard

Author:David E. Stannard
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group

The mood was more somber at the governor’s mansion. Lawrence Judd had been kept busy throughout the holidays trying to put together an information package that would douse the media fires still smoldering throughout the country because of Yates Stirling’s incendiary assertions about crime conditions in Honolulu. After an intensive review of court records by his aides, the governor learned that rather than the forty rapes Stirling had claimed for the city in 1931, there had actually been only one rape indictment all year, Thalia’s. Every other sex offense was either an attempted assault (eleven cases) or consensual sex between minors, what informally was known as “sex under sixteen,” Judd later wrote.

As for Stirling’s tale of convicted rapists going free after four-month sentences, obviously the admiral was referring to the gratuitous convictions of Ben Ahakuelo, Henry Chang, and several other teenagers two years earlier for “assault with intent to ravish.” In that case, however, even the judge had agreed that they had done nothing more than participate in consensual “multiple fornication,” a practice that he found “disgusting” but not illegal.

All this would have to be cleared up, and soon, Judd knew. Tourism was certain to suffer even more than it already had if Stirling’s broadsides were not corrected. And then there was the matter of the forthcoming fleet exercises. For Honolulu to avoid being boycotted by the navy, Judd would at least have to demonstrate good faith that the territory was carrying out reforms in the area of criminal justice. He met with his cabinet and ordered the creation of a temporary territorial police, under the command of the National Guard, to assist the beleaguered local police force. Then he began putting together a list of items that he would ask a special January session of the legislature to consider. They included making rape a capital offense, eliminating the requirement for corroborative evidence in rape cases, equalizing the number of peremptory challenges available to attorneys for the defense and the prosecution, and changing from an elected to an appointed police chief and prosecutor.

But as the holiday season unfolded, none of this was yet publicly announced. And Admiral Stirling remained busy, on Christmas Eve sending by mail an even more detailed account of the supposedly dreadful situation in Honolulu to his superiors in Washington, this time with inflammatory clippings of Advertiser and Honolulu Times editorials enclosed. Moreover, for every step Judd might take in the direction of mollifying his critics from the navy and from the higher reaches of the business world, condemnation awaited from other parts of the community.

In addition to the Hawaiian Civic Club’s denunciation of Admiral Pettengill, the Hawaii-Chinese News now was demanding that the navy rein in the thugs in its ranks who had beaten Horace Ida, contrasting this “stupid mob mind” with “the American principle that a man is innocent until he has been proved guilty.” In its Japanese-language edition the Nippu Jiji blamed the recent turmoil on the “racial feeling” introduced into the Ala Moana

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