The judge in the federal criminal case against former Honolulu Police Chief Louis Kealoha, his prosecutor wife, Katherine Kealoha, and four former members of the Honolulu Police Department’s Criminal Intelligence Unit has pushed back the trial by six months.
U.S. District Chief Judge J. Michael Seabright reset the trial date Monday afternoon to June 18. The original trial date was Dec. 19. Seabright said he will consider extending the trial further if any requests are made.
All six defendants asked Seabright for the continuance, and the government agreed.
After nearly two years of hearing from witnesses and looking at evidence presented by the government, a federal grand jury returned an indictment Oct. 19 charging officers Derek Wayne Hahn, Minh-Hung “Bobby” Nguyen, Daniel Sellers, retired Maj. Gordon Shiraishi and the Kealohas with conspiracy, witness tampering, obstruction of justice and lying to investigators. In addition, the indictment charges the Kealohas with bank fraud and Katherine Kealoha with aggravated identity theft.
Court-appointed defense lawyer Cynthia Kagiwada said outside the courtroom that she and her client, Katherine Kealoha, look forward to getting to the bottom of the charges.
“These are mainland prosecutors who brought very technical charges,” she said.
Government lawyers have turned over to the defendants a small fraction of the approximately 230,000 pages of evidence that detail their case. The government was withholding the rest of the documents pending the issuance of a protective order by the court restricting their release because the documents include confidential information.
The lawyers for Hahn, Nguyen, Sellers and Shiraishi had previously agreed to the wording of the order proposed by the government. The lawyers for the Kealohas told Seabright on Monday that they also agree with the proposed order.
In addition to giving the defendants time to receive and review all of the government’s evidence against them, Seabright said he is pushing back the trial because of the case’s complexity.
