Law: I Feel Sorry for Hawaii

A tourist rape case outrages an island paradise

The young woman was not unlike the fading Hawaiian afternoon: sunny and unhurried, going with the proverbial flow. A Finnish dental student halfway through a round-the-world vagabondage, she stood at the side of the oceanfront highway at Nanakuli Beach Park, waiting for a bus that would take her back to Honolulu. But she did not arrive at her hotel until late the next day. During the intervening hours she was raped repeatedly, a11 night long, by more than a dozen local punks, many of them stoned on marijuana. Hawaiians, especially those concerned with an enormous tourist industry, were already deeply disturbed about the state's rising crime rate. The brutal 1979 gang rape of the innocent tourist who came to be known in the press as "Anna" made headlines at once. Hawaiians started a Help Anna fund that soon reached $5,000. More than a thousand angry islanders wrote letters of protest to newspapers and politicians. Legislators in turn cranked out law-and-order diatribes.

The law works slowly. No one doubted, though, that the teen-agers involved would be brought to justice. They ranged in age from 12 to 17, and four of them had signed confessions at a local police station. But three weeks ago, when the case against these four was finally tried, a Hawaiian jury acquitted them. Since then there has been an eruption of local outrage against the island's criminal justice system. Two thousand protesters picketed outside the state capitol and the judiciary building. Last week Governor George Ariyoshi called on the Hawaiian legislature for a change in the state's rape law—in order to make future convictions easier. Even the mother of Robert Faubion, 17, one of the acquitted defendants, seemed to think her son deserved a jail term. Said she: "Justice is unreal."

How could it happen? Rounding up the young men had been simple. Indeed, before their arrests some of them gave a group interview to a Honolulu reporter, in which they admitted they "climbed her." Six months later, Anna flew back to Hawaii to testify at a juvenile court hearing on the cases of the five youngest attackers. The boys were judged guilty by the Hawaiian family court and dispatched to a juvenile prison.

Early this year, before the trial of the older attackers began, defense lawyers thought the case so hopeless that they attempted (and failed) to plea-bargain with Prosecutor Robert Rodrigues. Once again, Anna flew back to Hawaii from Finland. In direct testimony she described the assaults. But the defense lawyers declined to cross-examine Anna. In so doing they forfeited a chance to challenge her story, but they also cut off the prosecutor's only opportunity to draw further detailed testimony from her in rebuttal.