Waikele beating does not meet hate-crime standard

THE ISSUE The FBI is being asked to determine whether the beating can be prosecuted as a hate crime.

THE brutal beating of a military couple at Waikele Center as described by witnesses has produced understandable public outrage, focused on a racial epithet that accompanied the attack. If racial animosity had motivated the attack, it could have been charged as a hate crime, but that is not the case.

City Prosecutor Peter Carlisle correctly declined to charge the accused assailant with a hate crime because a car accident, not racial bias, triggered the incident. U.S. Attorney Ed Kubo has asked the FBI to determine whether federal civil-rights laws were violated.

Kubo appears to be motivated by public opinion. Like the state law, federal criminal civil-rights laws involving hate crimes are those committed against people or institutions because of their race, ethnicity or religion.

Accounts of the Waikele incident are without doubt horrific. A 26-year-old Army soldier who served two tours in Iraq pulled his sport utility vehicle into a Waikele parking place, and the SUV struck an adjacent vehicle. A 16-year-old boy got out of the other vehicle, called the soldier a "f--ing haole" and began attacking him.

The soldier's wife reportedly tried to intervene, but the teenager's mother fought with her. Gerald Paakaula, 44, the teenager's father, then emerged from an ice cream shop and allegedly punched the soldier's wife unconscious and, with his son, beat and stomped the soldier. Both the soldier and his wife sustained concussions and bone fractures.

Paakaula is charged with second-degree assault, which carries a penalty of up to five years in prison. If the attack had been charged as a hate crime, the maximum sentence could be doubled. The son, who barked the racial slur, will have his confidential day in Family Court.

Hawaii law, enacted in 2001, describes a hate crime as one "in which the perpetrator intentionally selected a victim" because of racial or any of other specified forms of prejudice. In this case, the soldier was targeted because of the car accident, even though his ethnicity triggered the bigoted verbal outburst by Paakaula's son.

Prosecution of hate crimes is rare in Hawaii, not because of the state's racial, religious and sexual harmony but because bigotry must be, beyond a reasonable doubt, the cause. In 2003, a Hawaiian man assaulted a white man off Waimanalo Beach Park after asking a woman, "Where's that f--ing haole?" and that "a f--ing haole is gonna die on the beach today." The confrontation was motivated not by race but by the victim's attempt to save the Hawaiian's dog from a beating by its owner.

A Big Island man was charged with a hate crime in 2004 for an unprovoked attack on campers at North Kona beach in which witnesses heard various people making racial comments about Caucasians. The defendant accepted a plea bargain -- without the hate-crime tack-on -- resulting in a five-year prison sentence.

Though the Waikele beating does not meet Hawaii's legal standard as a hate crime, it is a profoundly disturbing incident that has produced a flood of letters and phone calls to law enforcement offices and the media. Many are angered by the $20,000 bail set for the elder Paakaula and the maximum five-year sentence attached to the assault charge. As insufficient as they might seem for so violent an attack, those are issues to be addressed by lawmakers.

It will be harder to remedy feelings that the incident reflects a dangerous coarsening of life in Hawaii, twisting our image as the land of aloha into an ugly distortion.