 Yeah, welcome back to Think Tech for the 11 o'clock block. I'm Jay Fidel. We're talking about community matters, but the community we're talking about is not necessarily Oahu. It's Kauai. And we have the Prosecute Attorney for Kauai, Justin Kolar on with us. Thank you very much for joining us today, Justin. Thank you, Jay. It's an honor to be here. Aloha to everyone watching and listening out there. Thanks for tuning in and showing interest in your community. And thanks to everyone making the show happen. We appreciate it. Amen. Wish I'd said that. So you're running for office for the November election coming soon. And this would be what your third term. Am I right about that? This will be my third term in office. I was first elected in 2012. Grateful to be re-elected in 2016 and looking forward to continued service to the people of Kauai and Kauai for years to come. Yeah, and the question is, and you're unopposed, which makes it all the more interesting in terms of your career. But why are you running for prosecuting attorney? I mean, some people would say, are you kidding? I would never do that. But you like doing it, eh? I'm passionate about the safety of my community. I am passionate about the health of my community. And I'm passionate about service. I came to Hawaii in 2006 and have been working in public service ever since then. And I'm grateful to have the opportunity to live and work in such a special, incredible place like Kauai. I mean, when I was young growing up, wondering where life would take me, I certainly had no idea that I would get to do such meaningful work in such a beautiful place in a community filled with such caring people. So I'm a very fortunate guy. Yeah, Kauai's a special place. Let's talk about your training and your career and your qualifications for the office in general. Sure, I graduated from Suffolk University Law School in Boston in 2004. I worked for the city of Boston in their Corporation Council's office for several years, first as a paralegal, then as an attorney. Represented the city in all sorts of different cases, police misconduct cases, zoning cases, provided ethics, opinions, and guidance, things of that nature. Clerk in the Massachusetts Superior Court, which was certainly a learning experience for me, working with the judges of the Superior Court in Massachusetts, came to Hawaii in 2006 to serve as a law clerk for Judge Dan Foley, retired from the Intermediate Court of Appeals. And one day in 2008, he walked into my office and showed me an ad for a position for a deputy prosecutor position here on Kauai. He said, it's a great place, it's a special place, you can establish yourself and do meaningful work. And fortunately, I got the job, came over here, loved it, developed a passion for it, and saw an opportunity to come into the office and make some positive changes in our criminal justice system. And was very fortunate to be elected, like I said in 2012, and over the past eight years, we've really had the opportunity to put together a solid team of attorneys, victim witness counselors, administrators, investigators, and our line staff, clerical staff. So I get to work with 44 other people in my office that are passionate about community safety and share my values and share a sense of mission and it's a great place to work. Yeah, that's great. So, since you're running, I learned your run of powers, I think it's fair for you to discuss your platform. What initiatives are you advancing? What ideals are you ascribing to? Well, I consider myself a progressive prosecutor. I consider myself a reform-minded prosecutor. And essentially what we're trying to do is change the mentality of our profession, which in the 80s and 90s was very much a tough on crime, lock them all up, throw away the key type of mentality. And what we're seeing now is that we've succeeded as a country in locking up a larger portion of our community than just about any other country on earth. And it doesn't seem to be making us any safer. So, I acknowledge that there are people out there that need to be in jail and in prison and for people who've heard other people and people that commit serious crimes and cannot be safely housed in the community, we're gonna continue locking them up. But there's a lot of folks who are going to be coming back into the community at some point. 99.9% of the people who get sent to jail are gonna come back into the community. And I think where we've really fallen down as a system is at preparing people to succeed when they do come back into the community. So I'm very focused on using the machinery of the criminal justice system to help increase the beneficial outcomes from a person's involvement in the criminal justice system. Because if we lock somebody up for five years or 10 years, they come back into the community. Where's their support system? Where's their opportunity to become a productive member of the community? Where are they gonna work? Are they gonna be able to get a driver's license? Things like that, we wanna make sure we can create a system that addresses bad behavior, but also corrects, gives people the opportunity to correct their past mistakes and move on with their lives and escape from whatever pattern of criminality they might be stuck in. Two thoughts come to mind. A year or two ago, there was a program on 60 Minutes where they looked at punishment in Europe, especially in Germany, which historically has been pretty tough on crime, been pretty tough. But we found to our interest in that program that in fact, even serious criminals got out. They went on furlough. They were in the community even during their terms. And the whole direction of the criminal justice system was to replace them and re-initiate, re-put them back in the community. I don't know the term for that, put them back in the community and it worked. It worked and even murderers were out there participating in the community. And there was very little recurrence of the crimes. So what you had is a system that was very tolerant and enlightened, if you will, and that worked. And it was stark contrast with the system in the United States. And it sounds like you're more on the European model than some of what we hear on the mainland. Yeah, I mean, the Europeans do some things very well, I think, and their low recidivism rate, their low overall crime rate, and their low rate of incarceration is something we can learn from. There are other, our culture and our society is a little bit different, so we may not be able to adopt their system and treat it as a straight out of the box solution for what our problems are here in Hawaii. But one thing is sure and that is we cannot afford to keep locking up as many people as we lock up and the public safety does not benefit from it. If you've got somebody who's 65 years old and they committed a crime when they were 25 and they spent 40 years in prison, the evidence is very clear that that person is extremely unlikely to pose any public safety threat, especially if they're properly supervised and given the tools they need to be able to reintegrate into the community. So getting away from an overly punitive approach is something that is going to keep our community safe and also I think free up resources that our community needs to be using in other ways, whether that's drug treatment, mental health treatment. We've taken a whole swath of the social safety net over the last couple of generations in this country and said all of these problems are now gonna be the problems of the criminal justice system. And there's an old saying that when the only thing you've got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. And so we don't have all of the solutions in the criminal justice system to society's problems. So maybe some of those resources can be better spent in other ways. And I think it's something that's long past overdue for us to be taking a very serious look at. What do you say to the victims though, who are offended is a minimal word for that. They're damaged, they're injured. Absolutely. And I sit and talk with victims of very serious crimes. I work with them every day. When I was a kid, my uncle was murdered by people who were burglarizing his house. I know what it's like to feel that sense of loss and that sense of loss of trust in the criminal justice system as a result of that. And there are people out there who, I have sent to prison for many, many years who I firmly believe deserve the sentences they received. And, but it's also, it's kind of a fallacy to assume that all crime victims just want the defendant to go away to prison for the rest of their life. Some do, some don't, and then there's a whole range of folks who are in between. And people process those kinds of traumas in very different ways. And throughout my career, I've seen the spectrum of that. And that's always part of the equation is considering how does the victim feel about this case. But it's also part of my job as a prosecutor to explain that almost everyone we put in prison is going to come out one day. So what do we want that to look like when that person comes out? And this is an imperfect system. The conclusion of the case, you may feel very satisfied about the outcome. You may be very disappointed in the outcome. You may feel feelings that you didn't know you were going to feel at the beginning of the case. The criminal process, the criminal justice process is long, it's convoluted, and it doesn't always lead to the outcomes that everybody wants. So, it's my job to be very transparent with victims of crime in the community about what are the likely outcomes, about what we can do for them as the prosecuting attorney's office and what we hope to attain at the close of the case. One other element, again, you're really unopposed, but I think it's still important to discuss I guess it was a public defender wanted to release prisoners, inmates, who were well in Hawaii jails and who might contract COVID, which very humanitarian thing. They're also good for the community and you joined in that, you agreed with that and you supported that. Tell me your reasoning and tell me what happened and tell me your position on it right now. Well, the top five infection clusters in the United States are all jails or prisons. The potential for any jail or prison to become a flashpoint for the spread of COVID is very real. And we understood early in the process that it was something we were gonna need to address. I spend a lot of time talking with our judges, the medical staff at the jail, the administrators at the Department of Public Safety. We recognized, and we had it a little better here on Kauai because our population is smaller, our jail was not as overcrowded. We recognized that this was something that we could be part of the process and have a seat at the table or we were gonna create a situation where we were gonna get left out of the process and the releases were gonna happen anyway. So when we have a roster at the jail that's got 140 names on it, it's very easy for us to go through that list and identify who are the individuals on this list who can be safely placed in the community. Many of them just temporarily placed in the community until the jail is a safer place to put them. We looked at, at the outset of this pandemic, we looked at every place on the island where people gather in large numbers. I mean that we looked at the Walmart, the cost codes, the beach parks, all those places. And one of the last places on the island where we still had masses of people gathering on a daily basis, people going in and out of the facility. And that's not just inmates, that's the people who work there. And it was the jail. So we talked to the facility staff. We said, what is the number that's gonna allow you to practice appropriate social distancing, maintain hygiene and forest quarantines of inmates who may be suspected of being infected? And we were able to safely get Kauai's jail population under that number without jeopardizing the public safety. The problem is, now everybody's saying, oh, well, there weren't even any cases there, so you didn't need to do this. But the fact that there weren't any cases there means that what we did succeeded, not that it was not necessary in the first place. All you need is one case to come out of the jail and it's gonna turn into dozens very quickly because the corrections officers are gonna bring that virus back to their families. Many of them have very large families and it's going to just mushroom out from there. And we were able to avoid that so far here on Kauai. And we have to be very diligent about remembering that this problem is not over and this problem is not going to be gone anytime soon. And it's sadly very unlikely that there's gonna be a magic bullet in the near future that is going to enable us to return to life as we knew it in January. This is the new normal and we've got to do our best to keep everybody in the community safe. That includes incarcerated people, that includes people who work in the jails. So leaders have to make difficult decisions and leaders have to do things that may seem politically unpopular and it's our job to explain to the community why we're doing those things and explain it in a way that is transparent and does not lead to fear mongering or grandstanding. And so our preference is always to work together with everybody in the courtroom and not just try to walk in there and act like we make the decision in every case because we certainly don't. Prosecutors have a ton of power, but so do judges, so do defense attorneys. So does the Department of Public Safety. So we all have to play together nicely in the sandbox if we're gonna get good results for our community. You know, hearing you talk reminds me in terms of the courage aspect, reminds me of Bernard Carvalho, who I admired very greatly when he was mayor. And you must have had time with him because your terms of office overlapped his term of office as mayor. What kind of relationship did you have with him? I worked with Bernard for 10 years while he was mayor. He came into office, you know, very shortly after I came to Kauai actually when Brian Baptiste sadly passed away very suddenly. Bernard was elected shortly thereafter. I worked alongside him, both in the prosecutor's office and for three and a half years when I worked in the county attorney's office in his administration. He's a wonderful man, he's got a big heart, he's a hard worker and you're not gonna find anyone out there who is more dedicated to their community than Bernard Carvalho Jr. His father sadly just passed away, a neighbor of mine lived across the street from me. So my heart does go out to the entire Carvalho, Ohana and I communicated that to the mayor the other day. But you know, he's one of those guys I spent 10 years in the trenches with, you know, back in 2008, 2009 when we had furlough Fridays and we would go out and do community service projects on our days off. And we had a lot of opportunities to bond over the years. He's a good man, he's a courageous man and I gained a lot from working with him. You know, you spoke of, you know, it takes a village in terms of dealing out justice in the criminal world. And it strikes me that every island has its own personality. A lot of people feel that way and want it to be that way. And certainly Kauai has its own personality. People in Oahu, you know, they see Kauai as different than the other neighbor islands, you know. It's the Garden Island, it's very friendly, Kauai very lush, very, you know, actually old fashioned in many ways. People will have a very positive view of Kauai as a different kind of persona from all the other islands. But I wonder, you know, could you help me define what Kauai is like as opposed to other islands and what it's like from the point of view of the prosecutor? Sure, you know, and we do have a fierce sense of independence here on Kauai, the unconquered kingdom. And, you know, we're the fifth circuit. We don't have a fourth circuit in Hawaii. They went straight, for some reason we're special and we get to be the fifth circuit even though there's no fourth. You know, we do have a sense of pride in our uniqueness over here. And it's not that we don't have the same problems that other communities have, whether that's in Hawaii or back on the continent. We have a drug problem in the community. We have a domestic violence problem in the community. We have a mental health crisis in our community. And one thing that I think the current situation provides for us, I think prior to the pandemic, there was a great sense of frustration in the community with what is happening to our island. I mean, it's changed considerably just in the, you know, a dozen or so years since I've been here. Traffic is out of control. Cost of living is out of control. It's very difficult for working families, families with children, families caring for Kepuna. It's difficult for them to make a go of it here in Hawaii. And, you know, we're seeing our young people move away and they don't come back. So, you know, this situation as horrible as it is, you know, really gives us an opportunity to look at what, what do we want Hawaii to look like after the pandemic? Because I know that right now people are enjoying the slower pace of life. The lack of traffic, the empty beaches, you know, people are feeling like they can breathe a little bit. You know, we're not happy to be stuck at home. We're all missing our friends and family and loved ones that live in other places. But this has given us a time to hit a pause button and say, you know, what do we like, what do we want this community to look like next year? And I liken it to what happened on the North Shore of Kauai in April of 2018 after the catastrophic flooding that happened up there and basically shut down that part of the island for a couple of years. And during that downtime, the community had the opportunity to come together and really have a great conversation about, okay, when it's time to reopen to the outside world, like literally when they fix the road so that people can actually get here again, what do we want this to look like? And they were able to create solutions, like actual solutions with the government as a partner in deciding, okay, we want less cars. We want the cars that come to be parked here. We want X number of spaces to be held open for residents to be able to come and access these areas too. You know, and as a result of that conversation, that part of the island is a much more peaceful place to visit. It's a much more beautiful place to visit. The residents there are much less stressed by the overwhelming presence of visitors. And, you know, now we get to look at that on kind of a community-wide, island-wide level. And, you know, it's very rare that you get an opportunity to start over. I mean, not from scratch, but to really get that down to brass tacks and be able to say, all right, when the planes start coming, how many, where do we want the visitors to go? How is this gonna work? How are we gonna make sure that our residents are able to get jobs and to be able to have decent middle-class jobs where they can buy a house and raise kids and have a family and enjoy life, enjoy the good things about life on Kauai because there are certainly many good things here to enjoy. You know, the funny way Kauai is like a laboratory for the rest of us, you know, it's a smaller island and smaller population, but we can see what happens there and maybe we can take some lessons from Kauai. I mean, one example, for example, would be KIUC, which has done so well in Kauai, and we can all learn from its adventures and its progress. But I wanted to ask you about COVID in Kauai and how the mayor, Derek Kawakami, has done, how people see him. There are people who think he's ready for a higher office in this state. I wonder what your thoughts are about that. Well, you know, the mayor and his team really stepped up when it became clear what the scope of this pandemic was gonna be. I give a lot of credit to him, to our emergency management administrator, Elton Ushio, and his team who have been working, you know, the word tirelessly gets thrown out a lot, but he and his team have been working beyond tirelessly. Our police chief, Todd Rehbuck, you know, everybody really got on board early in the process and said, we have to take this very seriously. And, you know, as a result, we went 10 weeks with no new cases here on the island. Now, we did have another cluster erupt over the next couple of days, and it would not surprise me. It's fairly inevitable that there will be other cases here on our island, but people here are very resilient. They're very durable. They've been through disasters before, whether it's natural disasters, or in these floods, whatever it may be, people here understand the importance of doing what's right for the greater good, even if it's frustrating or painful for us in the moment. Have you had to prosecute anybody for failure to follow the rules? We've received dozens upon dozens of cases of people being cited for, you know, we had a curfew at one point on the island between, you know, the hours of 9 p.m. and 5 a.m. because it was very important to us at that time to make sure that people were staying home and not being out on the roads. You know, we attempted to enforce, you know, a message during the day of make sure you're only traveling for essential purposes. There were roving checkpoints across the island to discourage travel, and they were very effective. You know, and we have had numerous people who were cited for violating curfew, violating the rules against, you know, certain closures of park areas, and we've even had some fairly well-publicized incidences of people violating quarantine and we've charged them appropriately. Now, we know that there was also a lot of confusion, particularly in the early part of this process where we had emergency orders and rules, you know, changing on almost a daily basis. And, you know, we're not out here looking to hammer local residents who were confused about whether they could swim or walk on the beach or sit on the beach, you know, that's not the kind of person we're looking to hammer, but the people who willfully flouted the quarantine and jeopardized our public safety, particularly those who had the gall to travel here from the mainland during this process, you know, those people are gonna face consequences for what they did, but, you know, we also recognize that, you know, sometimes people are confused about what the rules are and about what their obligations are, and, you know, we take each case on its own merits. Well, Justin, you've presented a really appealing picture about Kauai and it's consistent with my appreciation of Kauai, my wife is from Kauai, so I'm a little soft on Kauai in general. But, you know, and when it's a big city environment also, you know, you spoke about the crime and the domestic violence and, you know, the drugs and so forth. And, you know, and we can't forget that it is part of the state and it is a community that does have people who break the rules and can't participate constructively in the community. And that leads me to ask you, you know, we have had a lot of problems with the prosecutor's office here in Honolulu. I mean, it has been a focus of public attention for a long time, scandalous and corrupt and what have you, leading to federal prosecutions and the like, are really awful to think that our, you know, as you said before, prosecutors have a lot of power. And it's awful to think that the prosecutor's office has gone off the side here in Oahu. And I wonder what your thoughts are about that and whether that kind of thing is somehow endemic and whether steps have to be taken to avoid it happening. How do you see that? Well, certainly, and, you know, elections matter. Elections have consequences. And certainly what's happened in the Honolulu prosecuting attorney's office and in the Honolulu police department in recent years has given a black eye to all of us in law enforcement, particularly those of us who try to do the job the right way, you know, and Hawaii is gonna have the same conversation that the rest of our country is having about policing, about criminal justice and about ways that we can make this system serve the community rather than injure the community. And certainly what's happened in Honolulu, I mean, it illustrates a systemic failure, a failure of accountability at every single level, whether it's, you know, the police commission, the mayor's office. I mean, it goes, you know, everyone has their role to play in this. And, you know, over the years in this country, we've created a system by design where it's very difficult for actors in the criminal justice system to be held accountable. When you've got a problem in the chief's office at the Honolulu police department like you did and he's only accountable to a police commission which is made up of lay members of the community who may not have any particular training or experience in law enforcement or criminal justice or management, you know, it's very difficult for a system like that to function. And that's what happens when you create a system that avoids accountability and transparency. It's very, you know, it was historically very easy for many years for bad actors to be able to get away with that kind of conduct. I'm sure it still happens in a lot of places. And, you know, it's up to us who have the platform to advocate for change, to use that platform to advocate to make our systems better. And that's what I've been committed to doing on Kauai in my career. And, you know, hopefully the citizens of Honolulu will choose wisely this November and you will see things continue to improve over there, hopefully. Yeah, well, you know, the whole notion of an independent judiciary and justice system, independent prosecutors has come up in the Jeffrey Berman issue in the Southern District of New York where clearly his independence has been undermined by the administration. And so I think it points out to all of us how important it is that we have a prosecutor who is independent. Just as our judges need to be independent, so our prosecutors should not be politicized by existing forces in the government or politics. But let me ask you one last question. And this came up in the context of the Leadership Institute in which your colleague there in Kauai, Mike Moskowitz was involved. And I think, you know, it's important that we all consider this. That is the role of lawyers and lawyer public officials in enforcing and preserving and protecting the rule of law, especially in these difficult times when the rule of law seems to be under attack in so many ways. Can you speak about that? Do you have a particular thought about that? Sure. We had a legitimate constitutional crisis unfolded in the Southern District of New York on Friday. And for a few hours, it was very scary to contemplate the possible outcomes there. And certainly that's something that has replicated itself in any number of situations over the last few years. To me, that's not a partisan issue, but it's just the facts. And, you know, one thing I'm grateful for is that in Hawaii, we have institutions like the Hawaii State Bar Association who do things, who do programs like the Leadership Institute. I was part of the HSBA Second Leadership Institute back in 2011 along with a lot of people who have become lifetime friends, including my good friend Becky Gardner who's running for office now over there in Honolulu. Shout out to her. But it's up to us in professions like the law and professions like law enforcement to educate the community, educate the people who vote for us. Prosecutors have a massive amount of power in the criminal justice system. I would say we are the most powerful actors in the criminal justice system. We decide who is gonna face charges in court. We determine what the agreements are gonna be offered. We determine what sentences we're going to be asking for. You know, our mercy and compassion or lack thereof changes lives on a daily basis. And so, you know, it's up to us to recognize that that power is something to take very seriously. And, you know, those of us in the profession who advocate for change have a lot of work to do in bringing along some actors in the system to kind of understand that you can do things a little bit differently and also make sure your community stays safe. So, you know, I'm grateful to have the opportunity to do that. Thank you, Justin Kohler, Prosecuting Attorney of Kauai. Thank you so much for joining us. We really appreciate it. Thank you, Jay. It's been my pleasure. Call me again anytime. Aloha. Aloha.