The plaintiffs in a long-running class-action lawsuit over long waits for Department of Hawaiian Home Lands homestead lots have scored what they consider another crucial victory in court.
Barring a last-minute production of documents, the state no longer can challenge whether potentially hundreds of plaintiffs whose DHHL files are missing or incomplete are entitled to damages — thanks to an Oct. 30 ruling by Circuit Judge Virginia Crandall, according to the plaintiffs’ attorneys.
Now the only question
remaining, the lawyers said, is how much they are owed.
“This was a home run for us,” said attorney Tom Grande, who along with Carl Varady represents roughly 2,700 plaintiffs in their
1999 class action against the state and DHHL.
Varady said as many as 1,000 plaintiffs could be
affected.
A spokesman for the Attorney General’s Office disputed the plaintiffs’ characterization of Crandall’s ruling but declined further comment, saying the office was preparing a motion for clarification.
A federal law enacted nearly 100 years ago established a roughly 200,000-acre land trust in Hawaii to benefit those who are at least 50 percent Native
Hawaiian. DHHL oversees the trust and awards ranching, farming and residential homestead leases for
99 years at $1 annually.
But hundreds of applicants have spent years or even decades on the agency’s waiting list, including some who have died without getting lots.
The class action deals with cases from 1959 to 1988.
While the court eight years ago ruled that the
defendants were liable for breaching their fiduciary duty by failing to deliver homesteads on a timely
basis, the question of who is entitled to damages and how much still is unresolved.
Answering that question has been a years-long challenge, with the two sides wrangling over DHHL record-keeping.
Varady and Grande have argued that files are missing or incomplete in hundreds of cases, some dating back several decades, and that the state failed in its fiduciary obligation as trustee to keep accurate records.
But the state previously has disputed that, saying some files described by the plaintiffs as “missing” never were created. The state also maintained that it already has provided thousands of documents for more than 2,400 plaintiffs and that DHHL was continuing to search for more records.
Crandall’s order gives
the state until Dec. 31 to
produce them.
While the judge denied the plaintiffs’ request to sanction the defendants for the document problem, she said in her two-page order that the state cannot assert an “affirmative defense” based on any DHHL document not
produced as of Dec. 31.
This basically means that the plaintiffs whose DHHL files still are missing or
incomplete by the deadline no longer have the burden of proving that they suffered damages, according to Varady and Grande.
“This is huge,” Varady said, noting that some beneficiaries applied for homesteads decades ago and may no longer have all their
records.
The next phase of the
litigation is expected to
focus on damages.
