Lawyers agree to delay trials for Puana and Kealohas

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CRAIG T. KOJIMA / JUNE 25

Katherine and Louis Kealoha’s trial on bank fraud charges was originally scheduled for October.

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COURTESY GREG KEAST

Dr. Rudolph Puana faces a drug distribution charge with his sister, Katherine Kealoha.

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Attorneys for the government and Louis and Katherine Kealoha and her brother have agreed to postpone upcoming criminal trials by several months and are asking a federal judge to approve the delays.

The Kealohas are scheduled to be tried on bank fraud charges in October. Katherine Kealoha and her brother, Dr. Rudolph Puana, are facing a January trial on drug distribution charges.

But in a court filing Monday, Assistant U.S. Attorney Joseph Orabona noted that the bank fraud trial is now set for Jan. 14 and the parties in the drug case agreed to move that trial to May 5.

At a recent hearing Gary Singh, the new court-appointed attorney for Kealoha, asked U.S. District Chief Judge J. Michael Seabright to postpone the bank fraud trial to possibly January, which would have required the drug trial to be pushed back as well. He said he needed the additional time to prepare a defense.

Seabright instructed the attorneys to see whether they could agree on new dates in both cases.

Monday’s court filing focused on the drug trial.

Orabona said the parties are seeking to postpone that trial to May because Kealoha has a new attorney and faces the bank fraud trial in January. He also said the case is complex given the volume of evidence and the nature of the charges.

The parties stipulated that the postponement would not violate the defendants’ rights to a speedy trial.

Because Singh was only appointed July 12, the parties agreed that the “ends of justice” would be served by the postponement to allow for reasonable trial preparation, according to Orabona. They also agreed that failure to grant the continuance would be a miscarriage of justice, he wrote.

Retired Police Chief Louis Kealoha; his wife, former Deputy Prosecutor Katherine Kealoha; and two police officers were convicted last month of conspiring to frame Katherine Kealoha’s uncle for the alleged 2013 theft of the couple’s mailbox and of attempting to obstruct a federal investigation. A fifth defendant, a retired officer, was acquitted.

The investigation, which started in 2015 over the mailbox case, expanded into a wide-ranging public corruption probe that is continuing and that resulted in the bank fraud and drug distribution charges.