The Zero Commission

There is a building in Honolulu where complaints can leave almost no public review trail.

You would not know it from the outside. The Commission on Judicial Conduct operates behind confidentiality rules that restrict public review of complaints, investigations, recusals, and dispositions. Seven members. All appointed by the Supreme Court. In fiscal year 2023–2024, the Commission received 1,009 inquiries from the public. It processed seven as formal complaints. It dismissed every one.

The story is process design. A one-judge frame would be easier: one headline, one recall campaign, one segment on the evening news, one aberration the system can remove and survive. The record here points to the design of the review process itself.

Procedural note, May 13, 2026: Ordinary explanations for dismissal include weak complaints, jurisdictional limits, duplicate submissions, confidentiality obligations, and legitimate screening. The residual problem is public reviewability: the Commission’s structure leaves little public evidence of what primary records were obtained, what conflicts were screened, which recusals occurred, and why each matter was dismissed. The reform claim stands on annual reports, appointment structure, Rule 8.4, and OIP Opinion Letter F22-02 independently of any one complaint. The data alone cannot classify every dismissed complaint as meritorious or every commissioner as acting in bad faith.

Record posture: the public proxy evidence is broader than the author’s complaint. It includes six fiscal years of annual reports, OIP Opinion Letter F22-02, public reform history, and public cases where judicial conflicts or misconduct became visible through litigation, parents, or reporters. The author’s experience is one stress test inside a larger public-reviewability problem.

Series Navigation

• Series hub: The Closed Loop
• Part I (this page): The Zero Commission
• Read Part II: The Paper Bag and the Architecture of Self-Investigation
• The Two Questions: federal investigative roadmap
• Hawaii Courts index

I came to this through the ordinary intake path. I had a complaint. I had evidence. I had specific, documented allegations concerning a specific judge and conduct I believed the Hawaii Revised Code of Judicial Conduct prohibited. I filed and waited inside a process described as confidential for the protection of the participants.

I later learned a public fact that the rules leave easy to miss: the last fiscal year in which this Commission reported any processed complaint outside the dismissed category was 2017–2018. Since then, six consecutive fiscal years of annual reports posted to the Judiciary’s website show every processed complaint dismissed. In FY 2022–2023, the Commission processed zero complaints. The process produced no public disciplinary output. Every complaint processed since 2018 received the same public disposition: dismissed.

The engineering matters more than the motive. Whether the design was chosen for efficiency, confidentiality, judicial independence, institutional protection, or inertia, its public output is the same: high intake, low formal processing, and no public record explaining the dismissals.

Start with appointments. Article VI, Section 5 of the Hawaii Constitution is a broad delegation. It says, in essence: the supreme court shall create a commission on judicial discipline. That’s it. No membership criteria. No independence requirements. No conflict-of-interest provisions. The Constitution hands the Supreme Court broad authority to design its own oversight body, and the court used that authority to keep appointment control inside the judiciary.

Under Rule 8 of the Rules of the Supreme Court of Hawaii, the Commission has seven members. Three are attorneys. Four are lay citizens. All seven are chosen by the Supreme Court. They serve three-year terms, but there is no term limit, and reappointment is the norm — some members have served for twenty or thirty years. The Commission cannot discipline anyone. It can only recommend action to the Supreme Court. The appointing authority, the final reviewing authority, and the branch under review sit within the same institutional structure.

This is a closed loop as a matter of structure. It may have been designed to protect judicial independence and confidentiality. It also concentrates appointment, review, and final discipline inside the judiciary itself.

Now add the confidentiality provision. Rule 8.4 seals everything. Not just deliberations — everything. The complaint, the investigation, the outcome, the reasoning, whether anyone recused, whether the file was even opened. A complainant cannot find out what happened to their own complaint beyond a form letter of disposition. They cannot find out whether a commissioner with a conflict participated. They cannot appeal. They cannot FOIA the records. They cannot discuss the complaint publicly without risking the Commission’s displeasure — a position the Commission actually took in 2019, before the ACLU and the Civil Beat Law Center forced a reversal.

It goes further than that. In April 2022, the Office of Information Practices issued Opinion Letter F22-02, ruling that the Commission is not an “agency” under Hawaii’s Uniform Information Practices Act. A member of the public who submitted a complaint and then requested a date-stamped copy of her own submission was denied — and OIP upheld the denial. Complainants cannot even obtain copies of their own complaints. The Commission’s records are entirely outside the reach of Hawaii’s public records law.

The filtering mechanism behind that 100% dismissal rate grew more selective by the visible metric. In FY 2020–2021, the Commission received 274 inquiries and processed 7 as formal complaints. By FY 2023–2024, inquiries had nearly quadrupled to 1,009 — but the number of formal complaints remained exactly 7. The processing rate dropped to 0.69%. More than 99% of all contacts are screened out before formal complaint processing. The surge suggests growing public frustration with the judiciary. The public record leaves the screening decisions insufficiently explained.

Confidentiality can protect complainants, judges, witnesses, and the integrity of preliminary review. In the Commission’s public-record posture, it also prevents the public from observing how the process operates.

But the detail that stopped me — the one that made the independence problem concrete — is a small thing. A domestic thing. It is the kind of relationship that would raise conflict questions in many oversight systems, but in Hawaii appears to sit in an unresolved legal gray zone.

A commissioner’s spouse is a sitting judge.

The relationship concerns an active, currently-serving member of the Hawaii judiciary — the same judiciary over which the Commission exercises its sole disciplinary jurisdiction. The person who reviews complaints against judges goes home at night to a judge. The person who votes on whether allegations of misconduct warrant investigation shares a household, a financial life, a set of mutual professional relationships, and a bed with someone who could be the subject of the next complaint that crosses the Commission’s desk.

There appears to be no categorical rule against this.

In a state with one of the smallest, most interconnected legal communities in the nation, where — as University of Hawaii Professor Randy Roth has observed — conflicts are “common in a small, isolated place like Hawaii,” the available public sources include no rule, statute, constitutional provision, advisory opinion, or published authority categorically prohibiting a judge’s spouse from serving on the body that decides whether judges face discipline.

Rule 8.1(g) — titled “Non-participation by members” — almost certainly requires case-by-case recusal, following the same formula used across every other Hawaii Supreme Court board and commission: members must step aside from proceedings where a judge in the same position would be required to abstain. That means the spouse-commissioner presumably recuses from complaints against their own spouse. Presumably. Public verification is blocked by confidentiality. Even perfect recusal in direct-spouse matters would still leave several questions.

The public materials leave three issues unresolved: whether the commissioner participated in complaints against a spouse’s colleagues, professional peers, or judges within the same small legal community; how household and professional proximity may affect institutional culture, conflict perception, or public confidence; and whether recusal occurred in any matter where the relationship could be material.

For a person thinking about filing a complaint, that matters. The annual reports do not show a public disciplinary output that would reassure a complainant that the process produces independent review.

In 2008, the Hawaii Legislature considered a structural alternative. House Bill 3056 would have amended the Constitution to create a new commission with members appointed by the Governor, the Senate President, and the House Speaker — diversifying appointment authority away from exclusive Supreme Court control. The bill reflected a basic oversight concern: a disciplinary body appointed entirely by the institution it oversees may not be perceived as independent by complainants or the public.

The bill stalled.

It received no floor vote. The Supreme Court retained full appointment control. The Commission continued operating under the same basic structure. And year after year, the dismissal rate held steady at or near 100%, a number that warrants scrutiny even if many individual complaints lacked merit.

In October 2024, the Supreme Court proposed amendments to Rules 8 and 15 — creating a formal “Administrator” position for the Commission and requiring judges to publicly disclose reimbursements exceeding $200 from a single source. These were the most significant structural changes proposed in years. They addressed capacity while leaving independence unchanged. The closed loop remained closed.

If the Commission were functioning, you would expect it to have caught at least one of these.

Chief Judge Randal Valenciano of the Fifth Circuit was accused of sexually harassing his judicial assistant for approximately eight years, from 2015 to 2023. The case was resolved through a $90,000 settlement paid by the Judiciary in early 2025, after the assistant filed a federal lawsuit. The matter became public through litigation.

Judge Mahilani Hiatt, a Big Island Family Court per diem judge, served on the board of a nonprofit that supplied guardians ad litem to her own courtroom — a conflict so direct it reads like a law school hypothetical. A father discovered it in 2023 and reported it to the Commission. The judge resigned from the board only after Civil Beat inquired about the situation. The matter became public through a parent and a reporter.

Justice Vladimir Devens omitted from his Judicial Selection Commission application that he served as a director of a super PAC associated with Pacific Resource Partnership, which spent heavily to elect Governor Josh Green. He was confirmed unanimously, 21–0, by the Senate in 2023. The matter became public through Civil Beat.

Three cases. Three different circuits. Sexual harassment, financial conflicts, undisclosed political entanglements. In every instance, the conduct came to public light through media reporting or civil litigation. The Commission’s annual reports for these years show the same number they always show: zero sustained complaints. The public output of the process remained unchanged.

Now widen the aperture.

The local process question becomes a broader public-accountability question at this point.

Hawaii courts decide matters that affect land, corporations, families, estates, guardianships, public agencies, defense contractors, and ordinary civil disputes. Those decisions depend on public confidence in judges whose discipline system the public cannot meaningfully audit.

The structure matters beyond the private disappointment of individual complainants. Capture and wrongful dismissal of any particular complaint require case-specific records; the public annual reports establish the public-reviewability problem.

A judicial-oversight system can fail public confidence without producing a public scandal. It can receive contacts, screen complaints, issue form dispositions, and comply with its own rules while still leaving the public unable to know whether serious allegations received independent review.

The public record shows no system that regularly produces public discipline. It shows a system whose public reports reveal extensive screening, near-total dismissal, and very little information about why.

This is the first in a series. What follows will identify public roles where the record supports it, trace appointment chains, map professional relationships, and identify where the public record leaves gaps. The focus is the exposed process: the people who filed complaints in good faith and the review structure that left them without meaningful public answers.

If you have filed a complaint with the Hawaii Commission on Judicial Conduct and received a dismissal, we want to hear from you. If you are an attorney who has witnessed judicial misconduct and declined to report it because you understood the futility, we want to hear from you. If you are a current or former member of the Commission willing to discuss its internal operations, we especially want to hear from you.

The process runs behind confidentiality. This series intends to make the public-facing architecture visible.

Records That Would Clarify the Commission

The Commission’s public-reviewability problem would be narrowed by aggregate recusal statistics, anonymized disposition categories, confirmation of whether primary records were obtained before dismissal, complaint-processing timelines, conflict-screening procedures, advisory-opinion logs, and written explanations of how Rule 8.4 confidentiality interacts with a complainant’s ability to obtain a date-stamped copy of their own filing.

Those records could preserve confidential complainant details while allowing the public to distinguish legitimate screening from non-review, and weak complaints from serious complaints closed without visible primary-record examination.

Exhibit: Commission on Judicial Conduct — Complaint Data, FY 2017–2024

Data compiled from Commission annual reports and Civil Beat reporting. The Commission publishes annual reports by fiscal year (July 1–June 30). The FY 2024–2025 report has not been published as of February 2026.

In FY 2022–2023, the Commission processed zero complaints — not one contact out of the entire year’s intake was treated as a formal complaint. FY 2017–2018 is the last year in which any complaint was not dismissed: 9 processed, 8 dismissed, 1 not accounted for as dismissed. The annual report disclosed nothing about what that complaint concerned, which judge was involved, or what disposition it received — it may have been pending into the next fiscal year or resolved through some other channel invisible to the public.

The FY 2018–2019 report provides the most granular breakdown of any accessible year. The 17 formal complaints included allegations of: prejudice or bias (16), abuse of power (15), outcome of the case (15), temperament/demeanor (11), personal conduct (11), prestige of office (5), administrative inefficiency (4), conflict of interest (4), ex parte communication (3), and political conduct (2). Categories overlap because individual complaints often cite multiple issues. District Court judges received the most complaints (12), followed by Circuit Court (5). All 17 were dismissed.

The Commission also received 70 advisory opinion requests in FY 2018–2019 and 53 in FY 2023–2024. Zero formal or informal advisory opinions were issued in either year — meaning the Commission produced no published guidance for judges interpreting the Code of Judicial Conduct during these periods, despite its authority to do so.