AFTER DEADLINE
Shedding light on government branch few citizens know
Just about everyone knows that Gov. Linda Lingle heads the state administration. Fewer can identify Calvin Say as the speaker of the House and Robert Bunda as Senate president, the heads of the two legislative bodies.
But outside of the legal community, how many know Ronald Moon is chief justice of the Hawaii Supreme Court? And how many can even say there are four associate justices, let alone name them?
Yet the Hawai'i Supreme Court heads the state's third branch of government.
"It is an institution that few citizens ever come in contact with but one that wields enormous power over the lives of Hawai'i's 1.2 million residents, as well as its businesses, political institutions and culture," reporter Lynda Arakawa wrote in one of the articles that was part of the four-part series on the high court that started a week ago.
"The point of the series was to give readers a look at how the state's highest court affects their lives, as well as shed light on the justices how make these decisions and what happens at the court," Arakawa said.
Her series hit that mark. It provided the first comprehensive series on Moon and the sitting justices, taking its place with previous reports by this newspaper on the court under William Richardson in the 1980s and Herman Lum in the early 1990s. In comments posted on our Web site and in calls and e-mails received in the newsroom, readers praised the depth of Arakawa's reporting.
Arakawa faced the formidable task of researching the background of the high court, its history and its decisions. Over five months, she interviewed dozens of people, including former and current Supreme Court justices, former governors, lawyers, politicians and average people. She tackled the sometimes difficult task of convincing those she interviewed to speak candidly about the court, which sometimes isn't easy for lawyers whose cases end up before the justices. And she also was granted the first wide-ranging interview by Moon about the workings of the court.
"Some lawyers and judges did not want to talk about the Supreme Court, although many people in the legal community were actually more forthcoming than I had expected," Arakawa said. "The largest difficulty in putting the series together was digesting all the information — newspaper clips, interviews and statistics provided by the Supreme Court — and gleaning from it the most pertinent issues."
The judiciary provided statistics, even those that showed a growing backlog of cases and a reduction in the court's public hearings. Moon's cooperation underscored his belief that one way to help enhance the public's confidence in the court system is to explain how it works.
He was the moving force behind the Nov. 7 conference, "Openness in the Courts — a Conference on Transparency in the Judicial System" that brought together judges, lawyers, the media and members of the public to discuss ways of how to explain the court's process.
With his interview, Moon provided a good example of showing that judges and justices can speak publicly about issues facing the courts without compromising their impartiality in deciding cases.
And while we don't expect everyone to now be able to recite the names of the four associate justices (Steven Levinson, Paula Nakayama, Simeon Acoba and James Duffy), the series provided both the legal and the larger community a better understanding of the high court's operations, its members and its issues in dispensing justice for all of us.
Ken Kobayashi is deputy city editor of The Advertiser. Before becoming an editor, he covered the courts for 23 years and was the primary editor on the Supreme Court series published last week. Reach him at 525-8090 or kkobayashi@honoluluadvertiser.com.
