In a post here on February 14, I reported on a Hawaii Supreme Court decision rejecting Dae Han Moon’s appeal of his conviction for murder for the shooting death of a 20-year old man at Ala Moana Center on Christmas 2016. Moon was also just 20 at the time of the shooting. He was sentenced to a term of live in prison with a 15-year minimum and the possibility of parole.
Moon is also a defendant in the federal racketeering case against former Kamaaina Termite and Pest Control owner, Michael J. Miske, Jr. He is charged with racketeering conspiracy, murder-for-hire conspiracy, and drug trafficking conspiracy.
At the end of that post I wrote:
As recently as February 1, Moon’s current attorney, Kauai-based Matthew Mannisto, noted the Supreme Court appeal in a filing in Moon’s federal case, optimistically stating the court “may be poised to overturn his conviction shortly before (or during) the trial in the present matter, and a reversal will likely generate its own flurry of publicity.”
Mannisto was trying to support an argument that there has been so much news coverage of Moon’s current and past crimes that he can’t possibly get a fair trial in Hawaii. It’s a hard case to make when there’s little evidence, so it appears he exaggerated a bit.
That became clear when the Hawaii Supreme Court decision in Moon’s case drew no news media attention.
Yesterday, Mannisto filed an “addendum and errata” to his earlier filing, noting a number of errors, including his predicitions (a) that the court was poised to overturn the earlier conviction of his client, and (b) that the decision would be followed by a “flurry of publicity” about the case.
“At present, it appears that only one media source of note has reported on the decision,” Mannisto wrote, referencing a copy of my February 14 post which he attached as an exhibit.
That single source was, of course, this blog.
Mannisto then went on to wrongly claim that my post had deemed the Supreme Court decision “not newsworthy.”
It, paradoxically, appears to argue that the February 10, 2023 decision is not newsworthy. One wonders why an item that is not newsworthy merited the coverage received in that very article. In any event, the matter has received little coverage since being announced on February 10, 2023.”
What I actually wrote was that the court’s decision in Moon’s case “drew no news media attention.”
And that is a very, very different thing than declaring it was not newsworthy.
It’s also something I know a bit about, as I’ve built much of my career as an investigative reporter over the past 30+ years on finding stories that are certainly newsworthy but have not been reported elsewhere. There are all kinds of reasons newsworthy stories go unreported, beginning with the dismal economics of local news reporting resulting in fewer reporters and news staffs stretched too thin covering the basics, leaving no time to dig further.
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There was no flurry of publicity about the Hawaii Supreme Court’s rejection of Moon’s appeal because that decision was not surprising and not terribly newsworthy. It amounts to legal minutiae that the general public doesn’t give a rip about. An overturned murder conviction would be a different ballgame. But even then, Moon’s just an unknown small-time trigger man and the murder case is old. Unless the ruling established or upset legal precedent, like last year’s highly puzzling Obrero decision, it wouldn’t light much of a fire.
The wrangling over whether Miske gets to keep either of his defense attorneys is of slight interest, but mostly only to the relatively small readership that’s inclined to closely follow this saga or legal affairs in general. The dude’s locked up, faces an avalanche of charges, and it’s not looking good for him.
Frankly, this stuff’s pretty tedious unless there’s a plea bargain or a big revelation about government corruption, a new victim, a surprising new witness, or Jonathan Fraser’s demise.
All that being said, local media generally do a pretty shitty job of following up on criminal cases. They’ll often report a crime but not a verdict because by then nobody remembers the incident. And the reporting is so often ridiculously shoddy. Don’t get me started on the outlandishly incompetent reporting that continues to falsely state as fact that Ian Schweitzer has been “exonerated” of Dana Ireland’s rape and murder. On Tuesday, HNN went a step further and gushed as unequivocal fact that new evidence and analysis “show he did not commit the crime” and even that he “was wrongfully prosecuted,” despite no court findings whatsoever regarding those reckless and lemming-like false assertions. In reality, his conviction was vacated. And that’s all.
KITV made the nutty claim that “All parties involved are thankful for new prosecutors and the judge who overturned Ian Schweitzer ‘s conviction in the courtroom after solid scientific evidence proved he was not guilty.”
All parties? What? Never mind that the prosecution argued against vacating Schweitzer’s conviction, which was never based on DNA evidence to begin with, or that his own brother implicated him in a very convincing confession that he only recanted years later, and that there was lots of other damning evidence.
This thing has become a circus, with TV clowns pronouncing judgement on things they just don’t understand.