Judge turns down request to disqualify prosecutors

A state judge refused Tuesday to disqualify the Honolulu Department of the Prosecuting Attorney from presenting a criminal case due to a pending petition to suspend prosecutor Keith Kaneshiro.

The case involves murder defendant Dae Han Moon.

A state jury in September found Moon, 22, guilty of murder in connection with the shooting of Steve Feliciano in an Ala Moana Center parking structure and of using a firearm to commit the murder. Moon is facing a mandatory life prison sentence with the possibility of parole for the murder.

He is asking the court to put off the sentencing, nullify the verdicts and either dismiss the charges or grant him a new trial. Instead of letting city prosecutors, who secured the charges and conducted the trial, respond to his requests, Moon asked Circuit Judge Karen Nakasone to disqualify Kaneshiro’s office and have another agency handle them.

Moon’s lawyer Victor Bakke says Kaneshiro’s office should not be involved in the case.

“That office is so dirty at the top,” Bakke told Nakasone in court Tuesday.

Bakke cited the letter federal government lawyers sent Kaneshiro in December informing him that he is a target of a federal criminal investigation. They are the same government lawyers who are prosecuting retired Honolulu Police Chief Louis Kealoha and his wife, former Kaneshiro deputy Katherine Kealoha, on conspiracy, obstruction and bank fraud charges.

State Attorney General Clare Connors sent the Hawaii Supreme Court a petition last week seeking the temporary suspension of Kaneshiro’s license to practice law as the Honolulu prosecuting attorney until the inherent conflict of interest from being named as a target of a criminal investigation is resolved.

Nakasone said the petition, by itself, is not enough to warrant disqualifying Kaneshiro’s office.

“Disqualification should not be decided on general and conclusory allegations. Yet in this court’s view, that is the state of the record here, that I have only general and conclusory allegations to support the disqualification request,” Nakasone said.

She also denied Moon’s request to call as witnesses Scott Bell, the current deputy prosecutor assigned to the case, and First Deputy Prosecutor Chasid Sapolu, who previously handled the case, in support of his request to dismiss the charges.

Sapolu went on leave in December after disclosing that he received a letter from federal prosecutors informing him that he is the subject of a criminal investigation.