Raising Cane
By Rob Perez
Holding sign
at airport sparks
court appearanceHee-Joo Kim was nervous. He was apprehensive. He was embarrassed.
The Korean citizen and University of Hawaii graduate student didn't quite understand why he was sitting in a Honolulu courtroom, at his fourth hearing in as many months, facing the possibility of a maximum $2,000 fine and a year in jail.
As if things weren't bad enough, a judge had warned Kim he was facing a serious criminal charge.
All for doing a good deed.
For trying to be helpful.
For holding a greeting sign at the airport.
This isn't some earth-shattering tale that has ramifications for thousands of people. It's simply a story of a nice guy who got unfairly dragged into the Hawaii judicial system, probably in part because of the heightened security -- some would say paranoia -- at our nation's airports since the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
It's also a tale that has brought the state embarrassing publicity in Korean communities across the U.S. mainland and drawn the attention of at least two federal offices, including the U.S. Embassy in Seoul, where a worker made an informal inquiry to a Hawaii official about the incident.
Kim went to the Honolulu Airport in late June to greet a delegation of Korean government officials who came to Hawaii at the invitation of the U.S. government. The delegation, from Korea's National Plant Quarantine Service, was heading to a trade meeting with federal officials on the Big Island.
Because Kim had worked for the quarantine service in Korea (he's on leave while getting a doctorate degree in environmental biochemistry from UH), an agency representative asked him to meet the delegates at the airport. They wanted help making their connecting flight to Kona.
Kim was happy to oblige. As president of the Korean graduate students association at UH, the 33-year-old married man and father of a 4-year-old boy had gone to the airport numerous times to greet new students. This was just another opportunity to be helpful, something typical for Kim, his friends say.
But because Kim didn't know any of the delegates, he brought to the airport a hand-made sign on letter-sized paper, with the words "National Plant Quarantine Service" written in Korean, and waited outside the international arrivals area.
About the time the delegates spotted the sign and greeted Kim, two plainclothes security officers approached him to ask for his identification. They wanted to know what he was doing at the airport, what the sign said and if he had a permit -- a requirement for anyone engaged in commercial activity on airport grounds. Among those needing permits or state-approved badges: greeters for limousine services.
Kim said he told the officers he was a graduate student who was helping the delegates get to their interisland flight. He showed the guards his Hawaii driver's license and UH student card. He said he told them he wasn't engaged in any commercial activity.
The delegates also came to Kim's defense, showing their special passports to indicate they were traveling on government business. Two of them tried to explain to the officers that Kim wasn't part of a commercial enterprise, he said.
But the guards cited Kim anyway. "I don't think they trusted me," he said, quickly adding that the guards were courteous and even gave him directions to where the visitors needed to go at the interisland terminal.
Although Kim hadn't committed an offense, he said he reluctantly decided to follow the guards' instructions to sign the citation, especially given his status as a foreign student in these security-heightened times.
Besides, Kim said, the guards told him "everything would be fine" if he explained to the court the circumstances surrounding the citation.
Ben Perez, an official with AKAL Security, which has the state contract to provide security at the airport, said the ticketing resulted from a communication misunderstanding.
The officers observed that Kim was greeting people without the badge required of commercial greeters, he said. When the officers tried to talk to Kim, they had difficulty communicating with him, Perez said. "From what I understand, it was a language barrier problem." (At several of Kim's court hearings, an interpreter was used, even though Kim can carry on an English conversation with little difficulty).
Kim would not have received the ticket if the circumstances had been made clear to the airport officers, Perez said.
Yet the company's version of what happened doesn't jibe with Kim's. He said he believed the guards understood him and the delegates.
And for what it's worth, I had no problem at all conversing with Kim during several interviews.
Engaging in commercial activity at the airport without a permit is a misdemeanor punishable by a maximum fine of $2,000 and one year in jail.
The seriousness of the offense was driven home at Kim's first court appearance in August when the judge said the charge wasn't akin to getting a traffic ticket and that Kim could get jail time if found guilty.
That made the UH student even more nervous, compounding the shame he felt just being there. The anxiety and embarrassment didn't get any better at the next three hearings.
"I don't know about Americans going to court, but for Koreans, it's very ashamed," he said. "I felt so bad."
The case was finally dismissed at the fourth hearing last month. The city prosecutor's office told the court it didn't have the evidence to prove the alleged offense.
Asked why it took so long to dismiss a charge that shouldn't have been filed to begin with, Jim Fulton, a spokesman for the Prosecutor's Office, said prosecutors deal with hundreds of cases daily and disposing of one after four hearings is not unusual, especially given that the first two court sessions are largely procedural and don't deal with the merits of the case.
In these type of citation cases, Fulton added, the initial paperwork is sent directly to the court, and the prosecutor's office doesn't have the discretion at the onset to determine whether to pursue charges, as it does with other kinds of cases.
Despite Kim's harrowing experience, he was reluctant to criticize the U.S. law enforcement system. "It was a good experience for me," Kim said.
His colleagues weren't so kind.
"We were outraged," said Judith Denery, a UH graduate student who works with Kim. "That he could hold a sign and get in trouble" reflects poorly on the freedoms people are supposed to have in America, she said.
Beth Irikura, another graduate student, believes Kim was targeted because of his nationality. "It was definitely racial profiling," she said.
Perez, the security executive, denied that race was a factor.
Whatever the factors, Kim's troubles have generated some unflattering publicity for the state.
Korea's second-largest daily newspaper, JoongAng Ilbo, ran a story about Kim's ordeal in yesterday's U.S. editions, distributed in major cities across the country. SangBok Suh, the Hawaii reporter who wrote the story and another one that ran in September, said readers have been puzzled by Kim's case.
"In our country, many people hold greeting signs at the airport," Suh said. "That's normal."
When Kim is asked what lesson he learned from his experience, he's quick with an answer: "I'll never hold a sign again at the Honolulu Airport."
Star-Bulletin columnist Rob Perez writes on issues
and events affecting Hawaii. Fax 529-4750, or write to
Honolulu Star-Bulletin, 500 Ala Moana Blvd., No. 7-210,
Honolulu 96813. He can also be reached
by e-mail at: rperez@starbulletin.com.
