CHC 1979-01-30 - Laserfiche WebLink

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and it is something that is also in the Honolulu Charter for the Prosecuting Attorney. It is one of convenience more than anything else as well as the additional power for investigating cases. There are many times when we must bother the courts for their subpoenas to compel witnesses who cannot act except under court subpoena, such as a bank to release records to us. Many times we have cases under investigation that require bank records. If a person has passed a bum check, for instance. This would allow the deputies to have the bank release the documents to us so we can inspect them to determine whether in fact there is a crime that has been committed. Otherwise it would entail a court subpoena, a court hearing, or a search warrant to get the records from institutions such as banks. The latter ones , the search warrants , is very distasteful to us and, I think, to the banks to have police officers coming in with search warrants to search the records. Most of them are very cooperative. In fact, I would say that all of them are very cooperative and they like to cooperate but because of the privacy acts they cannot do it. Then we would have to go through a court order to get the records. This would enable us to eliminate that one step. We also have a problem at times with witnesses who are very reluctant to come in and talk to us for one reason or another and these people sometimes become a little sarcastic with us and say, "we' ll see you in court" . Rather than waste the court time and waiting to get to court to find out what they actually have to say, by having the power to subpoena them to our office we can find out first-hand what is going to be said and whether they are even needed to testify for the State in court. These are the reasons we would request this particular power. This is the only major change that we are requesting. Other than that the organization, qualifications , duties and functions in the Chapter 9 are very satisfactory to our office. MR. OMONAKA: Your proposal here with regard to. . .without proper court order. . .can it stand up in court at a later time Do you think it would be wise to write in a thing like this into the Charter because we have a basic constitution we have to follow with regard to individual rights. You know, in that we have to go through proper procedure before. anybody can come into. . . . . MR. ONO: This would be by Charter and a proper procedure to use. The other alternative,---if you' ll notice that it says toward the end that IF the person refuses to come in to talk to the Prosecutor then the court will be the one to step in upon our request to compel this and unless there is good faith or good cause shown for his refusal to talk at that time he will be held in contempt. But if he has a good reason for not answering the subpoena to the court, now, we would not be the one to say, well look , you're in contempt you didn ' t answer us and you are going to be put away. We still would have to go through the court. So it is not like it is a unilateral power that we would have that we could exercise whenever we wanted to. The court could still tell us no, he -8-