It takes less than a second to allegedly commit a felony from the bench, and if you know how to work the record, it never happened at all.
In the case of Judge Wilson M.N. Loo, it didn’t require a gavel or a written order. It required only a nod.
The scene in the courtroom should have been procedural. The question before the witness, (redacted), was simple: Did you furnish the plaintiff with LSD?
The evidence was already in the file. A text message, submitted to the court, is described as reading: “I took the acid.” The text was sent to (redacted). If the text message is in the sealed court file as the complainant’s filing indicates, the documentary predicate would be present — Loo would have had access to evidence that could be inconsistent with a blanket denial.
But when the question was asked, Judge Loo didn’t wait for the answer. According to the complainant’s account — the only eyewitness account of visual conduct in an audio-only courtroom — he looked at the witness and nodded his head: No.
It was a silent instruction from the highest authority in the room to a witness under oath: Lie.
(Redacted) followed the instruction. He denied it. If the complainant’s account of the nod is accurate, perjury solicited and directed by a sitting judge entered the record as fact.
When I attempted to object — to say, “Let the record show that the judge just signaled the witness” — Loo cut me off. He didn’t just overrule the objection; he physically stopped the words from entering the transcript. He then ordered the case sealed upon the attorney’s request.
This wasn’t a judicial error. If the account is accurate, it was a structural crime.
Under 18 U.S.C. § 242 — deprivation of rights under color of law — a state judge who willfully deprives a litigant of constitutional rights while acting in official capacity commits a federal felony. The Supreme Court unanimously confirmed this statute’s application to state judges in United States v. Lanier, 520 U.S. 259 (1997). The conduct described here — if the complainant’s account is accurate — deprived the petitioner of both the right to be heard and the right to an impartial tribunal. The interruption preventing the objection from entering the record is captured on the sealed audio.
Why would a judge do this? Because in Hawaii’s legal ecosystem, the “Zone of Politeness” protects the powerful from the consequences of their actions, and the complainant infers that Wilson Loo assessed the parties — one connected to a network of local power, the other a pro se litigant with a “complicated” file — and he made a calculation. The complainant infers that he calculated he could commit a crime in open court, in front of a court reporter and a clerk, and suffer zero consequences.
He was right.
When the Honolulu Police Department was informed, they said I had to prove the perjury. When the Judicial Conduct Commission was notified, they played a shell game with jurisdiction until Loo’s retirement clock ran out the 90-day window. When the Ethics Commission was queried, they claimed confusion over their own authority.
Wilson Loo didn’t just break the law that day. If the account is accurate, the incident demonstrates how the combination of audio-only recording, sealed records, and a 100% complaint-dismissal rate creates conditions under which the law operates not as a system of rules but as a system of signals — where a nod from the bench can override the evidence in the file, a sealed record can override the public interest, and a pattern of institutional non-response ensures that when a judge is accused of a felony, the only person who bears consequences is the one who reported it.
The text message remains in the sealed file. The alleged perjury remains on the record. And Wilson Loo remains the perfect symbol of a judiciary where the truth is nothing more than a procedural inconvenience.
— Ekewaka Lono, 12 February 2026