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State must pay
By Pat Omandam
$2,074 court costs to Rice
for the OHA election case
Star-BulletinThe state has to pay Big Island resident Harold "Freddy" Rice $2,074 in court costs following the U.S. Supreme Court review and opinion of the Rice-vs.-Cayetano case.
The justices, in a one-page judgment filed with the clerk of the Supreme Court on Feb. 29, officially reversed the lower court rulings that Rice could not vote in the Office of Hawaiian Affairs board elections because he was not of Hawaiian ancestry.
The judgment finalizes the Supreme Court's Feb. 23 landmark decision that said the state's OHA elections were unconstitutional and sends the case back to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. The Court of Appeals, in turn, is expected to send the case back to Chief U.S. District Judge David Ezra in Hawaii.
OHA trustee Rowena Akana said yesterday the judgment confirms the Supreme Court was very narrow in its decision and focused only on OHA elections. "In other words, it doesn't address or even attempt to address whether the sitting trustees are legal or illegal," Akana said. "The fact that they (justices) don't address it is that we're legal. If we were illegal, they would have said so."
Shortly after the ruling, Cayetano said he would replace the eight elected trustees because his legal advisers told him they were elected under illegal elections. Since then, the state and OHA have agreed to file a motion in the Hawaii Supreme Court seeking clarification of the ruling. That motion has not yet been filed.
U.S. Public Law 103-150
