Judge’s ruling put Saito in hospital instead of prison

Now that escaped killer Randall Saito has been captured, we will endure a predictable round of hand-wringing and opinion-giving. Just about everyone will have a thought, expert or otherwise, about how this happened and what should happen now.

This should please Randall Saito. Since the moment he killed that poor woman in 1979, Saito has benefited from people’s opinions. He may have a scary past, but he also has a way of getting people to believe in him, marry him, and, apparently, look the other way.

In 1981, Saito was deemed fit to stand trial for murder by a “sanity panel” appointed by the court. The panel ruled unanimously that Saito, though suffering from a mental illness, was legally sane when he attacked the woman because he had the ability to control his conduct.

The judge, however, ignored the panel’s finding and, at the close of the three-day non-jury trial, ruled that Saito was not responsible for his actions, saying the nature of the crime proved Saito’s irrational thinking. As the judge put it, shooting a stranger is not a rational act.

Saito’s lengthy but relatively comfortable stay in a psychiatric hospital rather than a locked prison was based on the opinion of one man: Judge Harold Shintaku. If you remember that name, you probably just caught your breath.

Shintaku’s time on the bench was marked by controversy after he overturned a guilty verdict in a grisly double murder. Hundreds of people took to the street to protest Shintaku’s decision, Gov. George Ariyoshi criticized Shintaku and tough-guy prosecutor Charles Marsland was furious. The evening after he issued that ruling, Shintaku was arrested for drunken driving. He was released from custody, but found the next morning in a Mokuleia beach cottage with severe head injuries including skull fractures and bruises to his neck. Shintaku claimed he had been attacked while sleeping, but police called it a suicide attempt.

Years later, the defendant in the double murder admitted that he had bribed Shintaku to rule in his favor. In 1989, no longer a judge, Shintaku committed suicide by first slitting his wrists and then jumping out a window of the Stardust Hotel in Las Vegas.

Good old Harold Shintaku. He believed in Randall Saito. He gave Saito a break.

The one immutable fact amid all this opinion is that Randall Saito murdered a 29-year-old woman named Sandra Yamashiro, who had driven her new car to Ala Moana Shopping Center after work one evening and had the tragic misfortune of parking next to Saito, who shot her and then stabbed her. Saito confessed. He talked about it in great detail.

So here we are, with a state hospital more dysfunctional than ever, the lingering burden of one bad judge’s bad decision and still no option for a “guilty but insane” verdict that would require a mentally ill murderer to receive treatment and to serve time in a prison, not either/or.

In the coming days, as we are bombarded with the opinions of politicians attempting to use the fear caused by Saito’s escape to score political points and opinions of patients-rights advocates arguing for Saito’s chance to live with the least amount of restrictions, perhaps we also can think of Sandra Yamashiro — a Kauai girl who came to the big city and got a good job in the office of a big construction company — and the sad fact of her short life, her brutal death and the justice she never got.

Reach Lee Cataluna at 529-4315 or lcataluna@staradvertiser.com.