HONOLULU (HawaiiNewsNow) - A decision by the state’s highest court means changes are coming for criminal investigations in Honolulu.
Hawaii Supreme Court justices overturned the Intermediate Court of Appeals decision in issuing this opinion last week.
Police departments in Hawaii are now required to use video and audio recordings of all interrogations done at police stations if the suspect is under arrest.
“It ensures that people are not wrongfully convicted based on false, inaccurate, misleading testimony by police officers,” said Jongwook “Wookie” Kim, legal director at the American Civil Liberties Union of Hawaii
ACLU Hawaii submitted an amicus brief ahead of the decision.
The original case is out of Kona from October 2021. Charles Zuffante was interrogated at the station about drug crimes and Zuffante assumed the discussion was recorded because there was a video camera in the room.
However, the detective did not turn the camera on. The ruling also said the detective did not take notes but the next week, produced a report that “purportedly paraphrased and quoted Zuffante.”
During trial, the detective testified that Zuffante confessed that all the drugs recovered from the scene belonged to him. Zuffante said that was a lie and said he was then forced to take the stand to dispute the detective’s statements. Zuffante said that violated his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.
The Intermediate Court of Appeals did not agree, but Zuffante appealed to the State Supreme Court. The decision said the defendant’s right to a fair trial is “undermined unless police record an accused’s custodial interrogation.”
The Hawaii Innocence Project also submitted an amicus brief that said a significant number of overturned convictions stem from unrecorded confessions.
“If an officer is not going to record a conversation and it now becomes his word against the defendant’s word, then you’re kind of forcing that defendant not to remain silent anymore. You’re making him or her get on a stand and say, I didn’t tell him that,” said Ken Lawson, co-director of HIP.
The opinion said “recordings offer judges and juries better evidence compared to human memory” because they are more reliable and will help get to the truth. For any interrogations done in the field, the court said recordings on body cameras or phones must be done “when feasible.”
“In this day and age, there is no excuse to not have some recording device at the police station,” Kim said.
“Outside of the police station, so out in the field or in public or wherever it may be, there’s the feasibility standard, but the burden is on law enforcement to show that under the particular circumstances of a given situation, that the recording was not feasible,” Kim said.
HNN Investigates asked all the county police departments about their current policies and if changes were needed because of the court’s decision. The Honolulu Police Department will be revising its procedures as a result. A spokesperson said current policy requires audio-only recordings for felony interrogations, unless it’s a class A felony, then video is also required. The Kauai and Maui Police departments already comply. Spokespersons for both said it was mandatory that officers use recording devices including body cameras for interrogations at the station and in the field.
The Hawaii County Police Department spokesperson said their officers are now required to record interrogations but because of the ruling, they “are now memorializing it in policy.”
The head of the Department of Law Enforcement, Mike Lambert, said they are working on implementing body worn cameras so interrogations will have to be done in the office.
The state’s high court also made this requirement retroactive so cases that are pending even those under appeal could be affected with confessions possibly thrown out.
Four of the justices concurred. Two of them concurred in part and dissented in part, and one dissented, Associate Justice Lisa Ginoza.
