[ OUR OPINION ]
Remove state judges
who abuse discretionHAWAII has avoided the pitfalls of California and other states by continuing to allow judges discretion in sentencing criminals. While those states have required judges to impose automatic, punitive prison terms, Hawaii judges maintain some latitude in imposing sentences appropriate to the particular offender. When judges abuse that discretion, as Circuit Judge Sandra Simms did on numerous occasions, the judiciary should have a mechanism for expediently removing them from the bench.
THE ISSUE
State Circuit Judge Sandra Simms has been denied a second 10-year term on the bench by the Judicial Selection Commission.
Without comment, the Judicial Selection Commission has denied Simms' petition for a second 10-year term on the bench. Simms should have lost her robe years ago, but judges can be removed during their terms only for misconduct or disability. Those rules should be expanded to provide for removal after a judge has displayed a pattern of abuse of judicial discretion.
The Sentencing Project, a prison research and advocacy group, reports that nearly 10 percent of all inmates in state and federal prisons are serving life sentences, an 83 percent increase from 1992. In California and New York, almost 20 percent of the inmates are serving life terms, at great taxpayer expense, because of laws aimed at getting tough on crime. Too many of those lifers are mentally ill, were convicted of drug crimes and property crimes or are women who killed their husbands after being battered by them.
Much of the harsher sentencing has resulted from mandatory minimum terms, truth-in-sentencing policies and the three-strikes law in California, which a Hawaii citizens panel wisely recommended against in January. Because of judicial discretion, only 6.9 percent of Hawaii's prison inmates have life terms, 2.5 percent less than the national average.
That discretion is jeopardized by judges like Simms.
Appointed to the Circuit Court bench in 1994 by then-Gov. Ben Cayetano, Simms showed up on the public radar in 1997 when she sentenced a 20-year-old man to probation -- he already was on probation from a previous crime -- for stealing a Chicago policeman's suitcase after the man's companion nearly beat the vacationing officer to death on the North Shore. She later resentenced him to 30 days in jail after a public outcry. City Prosecutor Peter Carlisle cited the case in calling for an end to judicial discretion and imposition of mandatory sentencing.
A year later, Simms postponed the six-month prison sentence of a professional boxer convicted of punching and breaking the jaw of a 17-year-old boy at Makaha Beach so the boxer could have time to "bond" with his newborn son. "Having a child is a humanizing experience," Simms remarked.
In recent years, Simms displayed an absurd degree of leniency in cases of companies and their clients claiming that the 1893 overthrow of the Hawaiian kingdom was illegal, thus allowing them to challenge state property titles and ignore state taxes. These were simple cases of theft and tax evasion.
