HONOLULU– A jury found Honolulu’s former top prosecutor not guilty Friday in a bribery case in which alleged employees of an engineering and architectural firm bribed him with campaign donations in exchange for prosecuting a former company employee.
A US grand jury indicted former Honolulu district attorney Keith Kaneshiro and five others in 2022. The indictment alleged that Mitsunaga & Associate employees and a lawyer contributed more than $45,000 to Kaneshiro’s re-election campaigns between October 2012 and October 2016.
The company’s owner, Dennis Mitsunaga, who was sentenced to prison during the trial over allegations of witness tampering, was also found not guilty after nearly two days of deliberation, Hawaii News Now reported.
He was released after the verdict.
The jury also found the other four defendants not guilty.
The former employee targeted was a project architect in Mitsunaga & Associates for 15 years when she was fired without explanation the same day she expressed disagreement with the CEO’s accusations against her, court documents say.
Kaneshiro’s office sued the architect, but a judge dismissed the case in 2017 for lack of probable cause.
“I feel vindicated,” Kaneshiro told reporters after the verdict. “But how will I recover my reputation?”
His lawyer, Birney Bervar, told the Associated Press: “The first day I looked at this case, I didn’t think there was enough evidence of bribery.”
In January, a month before the trial was to begin, U.S. District Judge J. Michael Seabright, who was presiding over the case, unexpectedly recused himself. Senior U.S. District Judge Timothy Burgess of Alaska stepped in to take over the case and traveled to Hawaii for the trial.
Burgess ruled in February that the trial would not be postponed, despite an investigation into allegations that one of the defendants threatened Seabright, which led to his recuse.
The trial began in March.
Prosecutors did not immediately comment on the verdict.
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