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The Honolulu Advertiser
Posted on: Friday, July 18, 2003

Whistleblower settlement off

By Jim Dooley
Advertiser Staff Writer

The city has "reneged" on a settlement agreement in the multimillion-dollar whistleblower lawsuit filed against the Honolulu Police Department by decorated officer Kenneth Kamakana and the case is once again set to go to trial next month, Kamakana's lawyer said yesterday.

City attorneys previously "went before the judge and said they had agreed to the essential terms of the settlement, and now they've reneged," attorney William McCorriston said. "They didn't treat my client honorably as a cop, and now they're doing the same thing to him in court."

City lawyer Jerrold Matayoshi said he has not been directly involved in talks to settle the contentious and sensitive lawsuit, but added that he "does not believe those comments are accurate."

Matayoshi said he believes that another settlement conference is scheduled in federal court next week.

City Corporation Counsel David Arakawa did not return a call yesterday seeking comment.

McCorriston filed a motion in federal court yesterday to reinstitute Police Chief Lee Donohue and Capt. Milton Olmos as individual defendants in the case, personally liable for damages that Kamakana claims to have suffered for blowing the whistle on alleged wrongdoing in the department's secretive Criminal Intelligence Unit.

Donohue and Olmos, the former head of CIU, had been dismissed as defendants in the case last month as part of the settlement negotiations, according to the McCorriston motion.

Attorneys for Donohue and Olmos did not returns calls yesterday.

McCorriston revealed the settlement breach after a hearing yesterday morning before U.S. Magistrate Leslie Kobayashi concerning The Advertiser's continuing efforts to unseal records filed in court as part of the lawsuit.

Late last month, following repeated court rulings that the material should be open to the public, city lawyers unsealed thousands of pages of court records in the case. However, they continued to withhold substantial sections of those records that had previously been ordered unsealed by Clyde Matsui, a private attorney appointed by Kobayashi to review the records.

City attorneys said Matsui's reasoning in keeping some portions of the records confidential should have applied to numerous other sections that he ordered unsealed. The city lawyers blacked out those additional sections of the documents before turning them over to The Advertiser.

Attorneys for the newspaper protested, and both sides told Kobayashi yesterday that they are trying to resolve the dispute short of asking her to intervene again in the matter.

Kobayashi set a deadline of Tuesday for resolution of the dispute.

Kamakana alleges in his suit that he was transferred out of the elite and supersecret CIU and placed under criminal and administrative investigations by HPD's internal affairs division after he gave evidence of wrongdoing by CIU officers to the FBI.

The city has denied those charges, saying Kamakana was transferred because he was a disruptive element in CIU and because he violated police administrative rules when he gave CIU records to the FBI.

The city has spent an estimated $2 million in legal fees fighting Kamakana's case.

Details of the tentative settlement reached last month were not made public, but it was believed to call for payment of an additional $1 million to Kamakana, including payment of legal fees incurred in filing the lawsuit.

Reach Jim Dooley at jdooley@honoluluadvertiser.com or 535-2447