A federal judge yesterday denied a motion brought on behalf of Dae Han Moon seeking to expand access to computers at the Honolulu Federal Detention Center in order to review evidence in his case and effectively participate in his own defense.
Moon, 26, is the youngest of the twelve co-defendants charged with being a member of a racketeering organization controlled and directed by former Honolulu business owner Michael John Miske, Jr.
But despite his relative youth, Moon is the only Miske defendant to have already been convicted of murder. He was convicted after a jury trial of being the gunman who shot and killed a 20-year old man in a parking lot at Ala Moana Center on Christmas 2016 when a scuffle broke out during what appears to have been a botched attempt to collect a small drug debt. Moon, who was also just 20 at the time, was was convicted of murder and related firearms charges in September 2018, and sentenced to a life term with the possibility of parole.
In the Miske case, Moon is charged with racketeering conspiracy, murder-for-hire conspiracy, and a drug-related conspiracy charge.
The motion, filed by attorney Lars Isaacson in June, asked that Moon be allowed to have his own laptop, or have be permitted 20-hours per week using a dedicated government computer to review the estimated 1.5 million pages of documents and “voluminous other materials” produced by the government in his case.
Earlier in the case, Miske was granted special computer access due to the vast amount of evidence to be reviewed, but he remains the only defendant to have been granted additional computer privileges.
A hearing on Moon’s motion was held on Thursday morning, September 1. Moon was represented at the hearing by Kauai attorney Matthew Monisto, who had been assigned to his case just two weeks earlier. Two prior attorneys were allowed to withdraw from his case after experiencing “a breakdown” in the attorney/client relationship.