Posted on: Monday, July 5, 2004

EDITORIAL
Aki sentence: Judge chose best of options

Of the three options available to her in the manslaughter sentencing of Christopher Aki for the death of 11-year-old Kahealani Indreginal, Circuit Judge Virginia Crandall surely chose the right one.

She could have given him probation with up to a year in jail, or an 8-year prison term as a youthful offender. Those options would badly have failed to match the heinousness of the offense.

So we think the 20-year sentence, under the circumstances, was the only appropriate choice available.

The Hawai'i Paroling Authority will decide how much of the sentence must be served before Aki becomes eligible for parole.

The fact that, in sentencing Aki, the judge did the best she could with the options available does not take away a strong feeling of disappointment that stems not from the sentence but from the verdict.

Clearly Kahea was not the victim of reckless negligence or bad judgment but outright murder. The savage beating she suffered can only have been intended to kill her. Had it been interrupted minutes into its commission by a single qualm of conscience, she might have survived.

The jurors are not to be blamed for the inconsistency between the mildness of their verdict and the savageness of the crime. Attorneys observing the trial suggest that the jurors in all likelihood were compelled by the facts to seek compromise.

In the end, the jury decided, it appears, that the crime was too horrible to allow it to go completely unpunished, but doubts about whether Aki acted alone were too strong to accept a life sentence for such a young defendant.

The judge, too, was compelled by the heinousness of the crime to choose the harshest sentence available to her.

There's no way for the community to find satisfaction in a manslaughter verdict for this crime, but it can find some comfort in the appropriateness of the sentence.