Hell-Bent: One Man's Crusade to Crush the Hawaiian Mob by Ryan Jason

Author:Ryan, Jason
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781493016297
Publisher: Lyons Press (R&L)

When it came to Miller, Judge Acoba said he could not interfere with the hospital’s granting of temporary leave for its patients. The permanent discharge Miller was requesting, however, was another matter and subject to Acoba’s authority. During subsequent hearings regarding Miller’s discharge request, Marsland’s office asked Acoba that the violent mental health patient be kept within the hospital and under supervision.

Acoba was not entirely accommodating to this request. The judge denied prosecutors their last-minute attempt to have Miller’s victim testify during a hearing regarding his release. Prosecutors protested that they had just learned the victim, now living in California, would be willing to testify again. The judge dismissed the prosecutor’s office’s efforts as not only belated, but theatrical. Acoba said the victim, who had flown in from the mainland and was sitting in the courtroom in anticipation of testifying, could offer nothing new beyond her original testimony.

Acoba’s decision upset veteran deputy prosecutor Kenneth Nam so much that he left the courtroom in a rage and began to rant about the judge, calling him a “fucking shithead” and “the worst appointment ever made in the state of Hawaii.” The decision, sixty-three-year-old Nam said, was “utterly stupid . . . goddamn, I should live so long to see anything like this.”

Not to be thwarted, Marsland invited reporters to his office, where the victim was free to share details of the brutality of the crime. Her leg was broken during the attack, she said, and when Miller assaulted her with the beer bottle, he tried to break it inside of her. In the end it did not matter that the victim’s statements were not shared in court. Acoba denied Miller’s release from the hospital.

Any satisfaction felt by Marsland over this ruling was short-lived. Just three days later, Acoba’s decision to deny Miller’s release was eclipsed by the action of another judge, Harold Shintaku. In September 1981 Shintaku overturned a jury’s conviction of organized-crime figure Charlie Stevens for the 1978 murder of two people whose bodies were found dismembered in garbage bags buried in Oahu’s Waianae Valley. Given the inconsistency of witnesses’ statements and incredible evidence, Shintaku said, the jury could not have responsibly convicted Stevens. So he reversed their decision.

Marsland was dumbfounded. Responding to the judge’s reasoning, the prosecutor claimed there’s “inconsistency in any case that you try—that’s why you have a jury.

“The people of the state have been ripped off,” said Marsland. “What about justice? Consider the victims’ families and the victims themselves.”

As shocking as the overturned verdict was to the public, Shintaku’s action did not take Marsland’s office by surprise. The prosecutor had previously complained about Shintaku’s behavior at Stevens’s murder trial. The judge was observed in court nodding his head in agreement with defense lawyers and shaking it in disagreement with prosecutors. After the trial he was seen to put his arm around, or at least upon, Stevens, the murder defendant. The judge said the contact was incidental. Marsland claimed to have met with the chief justice of the Supreme Court of Hawaii three times to share these concerns, but to no avail.

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