[ OUR OPINION ]
Oahu’s garbage doesn’t
belong on the mainland
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Officials from the states of Idaho and Washington made their pitches before the City Council earlier this month to dump Hawaii's garbage in landfills near Boise and inland from the mouth of the Columbia River. Jim Hodge of Pacific Rim Environmental Resources of Seattle said landfills in remote areas such as Washington's Klickitat County are becoming "the harbinger of long-haul disposal."
A better answer is that increased amounts of garbage be buried neither here nor there.
Frank Doyle, Mayor Harris' director of environmental services, says the administration has decided not to solicit bids for shipping garbage to the mainland. He says such shipments not only would detract from other solutions for handling garbage but would be morally wrong to send the island's trash to someone else's backyard, no matter how willing the recipients might be. Sending garbage from one state to another also might soon be prohibited by Congress.
Doyle says the city instead wants to increase recycled materials on Oahu, such as green waste converted to mulch and compost and tires burned as fuel, from 500,000 to 650,000 tons a year. He said an addition of a third boiler at HPower's Campbell Industrial Park facility would increase its capacity by 120,000 tons a year of waste being converted to energy.
Both mayoral candidate Duke Bainum and Mufi Hannemann have promised to make basic services their main priority, and services get no more basic than picking up and disposing of garbage. Both have spoken in favor of using alternative recycling and more recycling and the winner should be quickly brought into the process as decisions are refined in the weeks following the Nov. 2 election.
Federal judges need
clarity in sentencing
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The Supreme Court ruled in June that certain aggravating factors in cases that had allowed judges to impose longer sentences must be decided at trial by jurors beyond a reasonable doubt. Although pertaining only to Washington state court, the ruling has paralyzed federal courts, where national guidelines have been used in a similar way.
"It's caused a tremendous amount of confusion and disruption in terms of how attorneys prepare," says U.S. Chief District Judge David Ezra of Hawaii. As a result, numerous cases pending trial in Hawaii and elsewhere have been put on hold while the high court reviews the issue.
In the June case, Blakely vs. Washington, the Supreme Court said the Sixth Amendment right to trial by jury requires that juries rule on facts to be used at sentencing, except for unquestionable facts such as prior convictions. Federal sentencing guidelines that have been in effect for 17 years allow judges to increase sentences for a variety of reasons.
In one case now before the court, a judge increased a defendant's sentence by finding that he had distributed 10 times the amount of cocaine that a jury had convicted him of distributing. In the other case, a judge increased a sentence after finding that the defendant had been a ringleader of a drug conspiracy, a determination not found by the jury.
The high court ruled in Blakely that a judge cannot set sentences beyond the "statutory maximum" on the basis of facts not arrived at by the jury. The majority in that case made clear at a hearing last week that the same standard should apply to federal guidelines.
The requirement, if imposed as expected, should not result in "carnage and wreckage" of the federal criminal justice system, as Paul D. Clement, the acting U.S. solicitor general, warned at the hearing. Most criminal cases are plea-bargained. Prosecutors will be faced only with asking juries to increase their realm of decision-making in the 3 percent of cases that actually go to trial.
