A native Hawaiian man serving time for brutally beating a white man with a shovel over a decade ago will be resentenced and could be hit with additional years in prison after his appeal of his hate crime conviction was rejected.
Kaulana Alo-Kaonohi, 35, was originally sentenced to six-and-a-half years by a Honolulu judge alongside Levi Aki Jr, another Native Hawaiian man, after a jury found them both guilty of the hate-fueled violence in 2023.
The court determined that the duo were motivated by Christopher Kunzelman’s race when they repeatedly beat him with a shovel in 2014 when he and his wife tried to move into their remote village in Maui.
Kunzelman was left with severe brain damage following the assault that placed such stress on his marriage that it catalyzed a divorce, his wife Lori said.
Alo-Kaonohi tried to appeal the conviction, taking issue with the federal hate crime enhancement, but the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed his conviction Thursday.
During the original trial, Alo-Kaonohi’s attorneys asserted that the attack on Kunzelman was fueled more by his entitled attitude.
It’s still not clear how much more time he could get. Considering the judge’s previous sentence, though, retired federal defender Alexander Silvert, who is not involved in the retrial, suggested three extra years could feasibly be tacked on.
Lori Kunzelman said she’d welcome the extended sentence after she and her husband were essentially run out of their dream home before even moving in.
The Kunzelmans still own the trodden-down house they originally purchased on the ocean for $175,000 while they were seeking an escape from Arizona after Lori was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis.
“We had vacationed on Maui year after year — loved, loved, loved Maui,” she said.
It’s been impossible to sell the home, Lori said, as locals just “won’t allow anybody to step foot” on the property.
“It was obviously a hate crime from the very beginning. The whole time they’re saying things like, ‘You have the wrong skin color. No ‘haole’ is ever going to live in our neighborhood,’” Lori said after the 2023 trial wrapped.
Haole, a Hawaiian word that was central to the first trial, can mean “foreigner” and “white person.”
Much of the struggles between native Hawaiians and white tourists stems from the lack of education surrounding the islands’ forced inclusion as a US state and its native history.
The Hawaii Innocence Project plans on contesting the retrial to prove that “haole” is not a derogatory term, the organization’s co-director Kenneth Lawson said.
With Post wires
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