[ OUR OPINION ]
HAWAII taxpayers would be irate if Governor Lingle were to set free hundreds of inmates from state prisons, as Kentucky's governor did four months ago, to reduce the state's budget deficit. However, that essentially would be the effect of the City Council's refusal to restore some of the funds requested by city Prosecutor Peter Carlisle and cut in the Harris administration's budget proposal to the Council. Criminals should not be allowed to go free because of the shortage of prosecutors even to bring them to trial. Don’t draw purse strings
on prosecutor
THE ISSUE City Prosecutor Peter Carlisle has asked the City Council to restore funds that were cut in Mayor Harris' budget proposal.
In January of last year, Carlisle sent a memorandum to Police Chief Lee Donohue asking that police cut back on bringing charges against nonviolent criminals, because the prosecutor's office could not handle the workload. The chief complied with the "don't book 'em, Danno" (or in this case, Dono) memo, releasing criminals instead of charging them. "We arrest them, they get out, we arrest them again," he said several months later. Allowing that debacle to be repeated would be crazy.
Carlisle told the City Council this week that the Harris administration cut more than $1 million -- $800,000 of it in salaries -- from his requested budget for the fiscal year beginning in July. The reduction would cut salaries for two-and-a-half attorney positions and three other staff jobs, plus merit pay for deputy prosecutors. He asked that the Council restore $450,000 of the funding.
Without the halfway measure, the prosecutor said the budget would reduce "from slim to none" the prospects of his office being able to adequately respond to crime. "I mean, it looks like we're actually going to be losing bodies," he said.
Harris' reductions would create difficulty not only in keeping experienced attorneys and recruiting and hiring new attorneys to prosecute property crimes committed by first offenders, Carlisle said, but in sustaining the career criminal unit, which prosecutes career criminals such as Shane Mark, charged with murder for last week's shooting death of police Officer Glen Gaspar. Experienced attorneys assigned to that unit might be lured to more lucrative jobs at the state or federal level, he said.
City Budget Director Ivan Lui-Kwan said the administration's proposed budget for the prosecutor's office is 1 percent less than the current year's $13.5 million. He said Carlisle's concerns are "pretty much the same kind of arguments that were made by all of the directors" of other departments.
The difference is that public safety would be at risk if the prosecutor's office were to be shortchanged. Honolulu residents should not have to rely on what Carlisle describes as "a team without any bench" to bring criminals to justice. Of all the ways to balance the city's budget, that is the least acceptable.
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Published by Oahu Publications Inc., a subsidiary of Black Press.Don Kendall, Publisher
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