Hawai'i Legal News

OVERRULED!   State v. Willis (ICA April 30, 2024) Background. Erik Willis was indicted for attempted murder in the second degree. This case goes back to 2020, when a 17-year-old girl was found on a Kahala Beach with stab wounds to her stomach. She survived. The police found surveillance footage showing that before she was found a “fair-skinned man, with dark curly hair, a blue disposable face mask, a clean white t-shirt, tan pants, and dark colored shoes with white striping on the side” was near the area. Footage from a bus showed the man getting on the bus and heading to the Kahala beach he got out off the bus approximately twenty minutes before the woman was found. More footage showed that at around the time the woman was found the man was running from the beach to a sink and appeared to “wash himself off.” At around 4 p.m., the man is seen with a soiled t-shirt sitting on the bus. HPD officer Matthew Motas watched the footage and identified the man as Willis.   ...

State v. Kaneaikala (HSC October 1, 2019) Background. Bronson Kaneaiakala was charged with one count of burglary in the first degree. The key to the prosecution’s case was the testimony of Mari Laraway. Laraway was walking with her son on Date street from their apartment to her car when she saw a man crouching under a window of a ground-floor apartment. When she got to her car she saw the men entering the apartment through a window. It was in the middle of the day in January. Laraway called 911. Police officers found Kaneaiakala naked in the laundry room of the apartment building with items missing from an apartment. He was arrested. Two-and-a-half hours later Laraway met the officers on the street outside the building. He was shirtless, h andcuffed, and standing next to a police car surrounded by police officers. Laraway looked at Kaneaiakala and told the officers she was “almost positive” that that was the man she saw. Kaneaiakala filed a motion to suppress the identificatio...