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 2024–2025, the Commission reported 1,355 inquiries, 11 complaints processed, 6 complaints dismissed, and 5 complaints pending at year-end.

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.

The Commission’s public records do not establish why each complaint was dismissed or what primary evidence was reviewed. Aggregate disposition categories, review records, conflict screening, and recusal documentation could test competing explanations. The reform claim rests on annual reports, appointment structure, Rule 8.4, and OIP Opinion Letter F22-02; the data alone do not establish the merits of every complaint or any commissioner’s intent.

Record posture: the public proxy evidence is broader than my 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. My 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.

The historical run is still striking, but the newly published FY 2024–2025 report changes the endpoint. From FY 2018–2019 through FY 2023–2024, every complaint the annual reports listed as processed was also listed as dismissed; FY 2022–2023 reported zero processed complaints. In FY 2024–2025, however, the Commission processed 11 complaints, dismissed 6, and reported 5 still pending at year-end. The public report does not identify those pending matters or their eventual dispositions.

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.

Charles Gardner Geyh treats judicial independence and accountability as means of serving the rule of law. Independence protects impartial judgment from improper influence; it does not answer whether a disciplinary process provides meaningful scrutiny.¹ The Commission’s appointment structure, conflict safeguards, and external reviewability therefore require examination on their own terms.

Rule 8.4 keeps complaint-stage proceedings and records confidential, with specified public disclosures if formal disciplinary proceedings begin. Charges, answers, and hearings can become public; deliberations and the initial investigatory file remain confidential. The annual reports do not reveal why particular complaints were closed or who recused. In 2019, the Commission also sought to restrict complainants’ public discussion of their complaints, before reversing that position after intervention by the ACLU and the Civil Beat Law Center.

In April 2022, the Office of Information Practices issued Opinion Letter F22-02. A complainant had requested a date-stamped copy of her own submission. OIP held that UIPA did not require its release because the requested records concerned the court’s nonadministrative functions. That decision establishes the lack of a UIPA entitlement in that case, rather than a universal prohibition on complainants obtaining their own filings.

The visible filtering remains severe even after that change. In FY 2020–2021, the Commission received 274 inquiries and processed 7 complaints. In FY 2024–2025, it reported 1,355 inquiries, 1,344 not handled as complaints, and 11 complaints processed. That is a processing rate of about 0.81%, meaning more than 99% of inquiries were not handled as complaints. The public reports provide aggregate outcomes but little visibility into the screening decisions behind that attrition.

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.

Research on administrative burden distinguishes learning costs, compliance costs, and psychological costs imposed by public processes. Applying Herd and colleagues’ framework, developed primarily in public services and social-policy administration, to judicial complaints is an analytical extension.² It directs attention to finding the proper channel, supplying records, understanding confidentiality and jurisdictional deadlines, and obtaining an intelligible disposition. Those burdens can be measured separately from a complaint’s merits.

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 spouse serves in the judiciary the Commission oversees. That relationship raises questions about household, financial, and professional ties, the independence of review, and whether required recusals can be verified.

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) requires Commission members to refrain from proceedings where a similarly situated judge would have to abstain. The safeguard exists. What the public record does not establish is how it was applied in particular confidential matters, including complaints involving a member’s spouse. Even proper recusal in those matters would leave questions about other professional and household relationships.

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. Through FY 2023–2024, the published annual reports showed every processed complaint since FY 2018–2019 as dismissed; FY 2024–2025 then reported five matters still pending. That historical attrition 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.

The following episodes test what the public can learn about Commission review. Its reports do not show whether or how it received, screened, investigated, or resolved these particular matters. The absence of a public disciplinary outcome does not establish that no confidential action occurred.

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 public annual reports do not provide an actor-specific merits trail connecting those episodes to complaint outcomes. The reviewability problem is the absence of that public linkage, not a claim that every complaint should have been sustained.

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.

For an individual complaint, the original intake, evidence inventory, procedural notices, audio-access requests and responses, and stated disposition basis could identify where review became practically inaccessible. A dated comparison of those records should establish what primary evidence the Commission obtained and examined before closure, and what remained unavailable to the complainant.

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 2017–2025

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, published in April 2026, is included below.

In FY 2022–2023, the Commission reported 651 inquiries, all 651 not handled as complaints, and zero complaints processed or dismissed.³ Yet its March 13, 2025 letter reports a March 22, 2023 “insufficient evidence” disposition of my earlier submission, as described in the Loo chronology. How was that submission classified in the FY 2022–2023 statistics, and what record explains the classification? The original submission, intake classification, disposition letter, and annual-report reporting definitions could answer that question. An inquiry-level closure could account for both statements; the available records do not establish an inaccurate annual report.

FY 2017–2018 reported 9 processed and 8 dismissed, leaving one not listed as dismissed in that annual table. FY 2024–2025 is the next year in this series with complaints outside the dismissed column: 11 processed, 6 dismissed, and 5 pending at year-end. The public annual report does not identify those pending complaints or their later dispositions.

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.

Sources and Notes