HONOLULU– A jury found Honolulu’s former chief prosecutor not guilty Friday in a bribery case in which alleged employees of an engineering and architectural firm bribed him with campaign donations in exchange for his prosecution of a former company employee.
A U.S. grand jury indicted former Honolulu prosecutor Keith Kaneshiro and five others in 2022. The indictment alleged that Mitsunaga & Associates employees and an attorney contributed more than $45,000 to Kaneshiro’s re-election campaigns between October 2012 and October 2016.
The company’s owner, Dennis Mitsunaga, who was jailed during the trial on witness tampering charges, was also found not guilty after nearly two days of deliberation, Hawaii News Now reported.
He was released after the verdict.
The jury also found the other four defendants not guilty.
The former employee targeted for prosecution had been a project architect at Mitsunaga & Associates for 15 years when she was fired without explanation on the same day she disagreed with the CEO’s claims against her, according to court documents.
Kaneshiro’s office prosecuted the architect, but a judge dismissed the case in 2017 for lack of probable cause.
“I feel vindicated,” Kaneshiro told reporters after the verdict. “But how do I get my reputation back?”
His lawyer, Birney Bervar, told The Associated Press: “The first day I looked at this case, I felt like there wasn’t enough evidence of bribery.”
In January, a month before the trial was set to begin, U.S. District Judge J. Michael Seabright, who had presided over the case, unexpectedly recused himself. Senior U.S. District Judge Timothy Burgess of Alaska stepped in to take over the case and traveled to Hawaii for the trial.
Burgess ruled in February that the trial would not be further delayed despite an investigation into allegations that one of the defendants had threatened Seabright, prompting his refusal.
The trial started in March.
Prosecutors did not immediately comment on the verdict.