The Zero Commission

There is a building in Honolulu where complaints go to die.

You wouldn’t know it from the outside. The Commission on Judicial Conduct operates with all the visible urgency of a tide pool — still, contained, and utterly opaque. Seven members. All appointed by the very Supreme Court they exist to oversee. Proceedings sealed behind confidentiality rules so total that even acknowledging a complaint exists can get you sanctioned. In fiscal year 2023–2024, they received 1,009 inquiries from the public. They processed seven as formal complaints. They dismissed every single one.

This is not a story about one bad judge. It would be easier if it were. One bad judge is a headline, a recall campaign, a segment on the evening news. One bad judge can be removed, and the system that produced him can shrug and call it an aberration. What I am describing is not an aberration. It is architecture.

I came to this the way most people do — through the front door, like a fool, believing the building was what it said on the sign. I had a complaint. I had evidence. I had the specific, documented conduct of a specific judge doing specific things that the Hawaii Revised Code of Judicial Conduct specifically prohibits. I filed. I waited. I waited in the particular way you wait when you’ve been told the process is confidential for your protection, which is the same voice they use when they tell you the camera in the interrogation room is off.

What I did not know then — what almost no one knows, because the rules are designed to ensure almost no one can know — is that the last time this Commission did not dismiss every complaint it processed was fiscal year 2017–2018. Since then — six consecutive fiscal years of annual reports, each one posted to the Judiciary’s own website — every complaint processed has been dismissed. Every single one. In FY 2022–2023, the Commission did not process a single complaint at all. Zero. The machine did not even engage. Every complaint filed since 2018, across every circuit, from every citizen and attorney who took the time to document misconduct and submit it through proper channels — all of it, every page, every exhibit — fed into the same machine and came out the same way. Dismissed. Case closed. The judge is fine. You may go.

You have to admire the engineering, in the way le Carré’s George Smiley admired the elegance of a well-run double agent — not with joy, but with the cold recognition that someone thought this through.

Start with appointments. Article VI, Section 5 of the Hawaii Constitution is a masterpiece of 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 a blank check to design its own oversight body, and the court — with the restraint of a fox asked to architect the henhouse — cashed it.

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 whom? To the Supreme Court. The same body that appointed every member. The same body whose judges are the only people the Commission has jurisdiction over.

This is a closed loop. It was always a closed loop. It was designed as a closed loop.

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.

And the filtering mechanism that produces that 100% dismissal rate? It is getting more efficient, not less. 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 the Commission’s machinery even engages. The surge suggests growing public frustration with the judiciary. The Commission’s response was to hold the gate tighter.

Confidentiality, in this context, is not protecting anyone’s reputation. It is protecting the machine from being observed while it operates.

But the detail that stopped me — the one that transformed this from a story about bureaucratic dysfunction into something darker — is a small thing. A domestic thing. The kind of thing that in most jurisdictions would be an obvious, disqualifying conflict of interest but in Hawaii exists in a legal gray zone so carefully maintained that you have to wonder who’s tending it.

A commissioner’s spouse is a sitting judge.

Not a retired judge. Not a former judge. 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 is no rule against this.

Read that again. 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,” there is no rule, no statute, no constitutional provision, no advisory opinion, and no published authority of any kind that prohibits 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. We cannot verify this, because the proceedings are confidential. But even if we take it on faith that the recusal happens flawlessly every time, it addresses nothing.

It does not address the commissioner’s participation in complaints against their spouse’s colleagues. Their spouse’s friends. The judges their spouse sees at conferences, works with on committees, or appears before on appeal. It does not address the informal influence a commissioner married to a judge exercises over the Commission’s culture, its sense of professional solidarity, its instinctive sympathy for the pressures judges face. It does not address the message it sends to every other commissioner about how seriously this body takes its independence from the judiciary it serves.

And it does not address the message it sends to you — the person thinking about filing a complaint, weighing whether the system will give you a fair hearing. The answer, written in seven years of data, is no.

In 2008, the Hawaii Legislature tried to fix this. 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 the Supreme Court’s monopoly. The bill acknowledged what everyone paying attention already knew: a disciplinary body appointed entirely by the institution it oversees is not independent in any meaningful sense. It is a rubber stamp with a gavel.

The bill died.

It died the way reform dies in Hawaii — quietly, in committee, without a floor vote, mourned by no one with the power to resurrect it. The Supreme Court retained full control. The Commission continued operating exactly as designed. And year after year, the dismissal rate held steady at or near 100%, a number so pristine it could only be produced by a system that has fundamentally decided, at the structural level, that judicial misconduct does not exist.

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. They did not touch independence. 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 Commission did not surface this. A lawsuit did.

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 Commission did not surface this. A parent and a reporter did.

Justice Vladimir Devens did not disclose on 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 Commission did not surface this. Civil Beat did.

Three cases. Three different circuits. Sexual harassment, financial conflicts, undisclosed political entanglements. In every instance, the misconduct came to light through media reporting or civil litigation — never through the body designed to catch it. The Commission’s annual reports for these years show the same number they always show: zero sustained complaints. The machine processed the inputs and produced the output it was built to produce.

Now widen the aperture.

This is the part where I’m supposed to stay in my lane. Keep it local. A judge did a bad thing, the complaint system doesn’t work, isn’t that a shame. Write your congressman.

I’m not going to do that.

Hawaii is not Iowa. It is not a midsized state whose judicial dysfunction, however unfortunate, remains a local concern. Hawaii is the forward operating base of American power projection into the Pacific. INDOPACOM. Pacific Fleet. NSA Hawaii. Every branch of the military maintains significant installations here. The intelligence community’s Pacific footprint runs through this archipelago. The geopolitical competition with China — the defining strategic challenge of this century — is managed, in significant part, from these islands.

And the judiciary here does not function.

Not in the dramatic, failing-state way that makes international news. In the quiet way. The way le Carré understood — the way a system fails when it has been captured so completely that failure looks like business as usual. A captured judiciary doesn’t announce itself. It processes cases. It holds hearings. It issues rulings. It simply does so within a framework where certain outcomes are more likely than others, certain actors are more protected than others, and certain complaints — no matter how well documented — will always be dismissed.

A judiciary that cannot be held accountable is a judiciary that can be used. Land transactions, corporate formations, contract disputes, estates, guardianships, immigration matters — the entire commercial and civil infrastructure of the state flows through courts whose judges face no functioning oversight. If you wanted to move money through Hawaii, influence property rights, or protect certain interests from legal challenge, you would not need to corrupt the judges. You would only need to ensure that the system designed to catch corruption doesn’t work.

It doesn’t work.

Someone built it that way.

This is the first in a series. What follows will name names, trace appointment chains, map the professional and personal relationships that connect the Commission to the bench to the bar to the institutions that benefit from the arrangement. We will publish the exposed and the exposed-to — the people who filed complaints in good faith and the machine that swallowed them whole.

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 machine runs on silence. We intend to be loud.

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.