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A Native Hawaiian man who was convicted of a hate crime against a white man must be re-sentenced, a U.S. appeals court ruled on Thursday, potentially leading to additional years in prison.
Kaulana Alo-Kaonohi was sentenced by a Honolulu judge in 2023 to six-and-a-half years after a jury found him and another Native Hawaiian man, Levi Aki Jr., guilty.
The jury found the pair to be motivated by race when they punched, kicked and used a shovel to beat Christopher Kunzelman in 2014 for attempting to move into their remote village in Maui.
Alo-Kaonohi appealed the conviction, and prosecutors cross-appealed, challenging the judge’s ruling that the hate crime enhancement could not be applied to the sentence.
The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals panel also ruled on Thursday to affirm Alo-Kaonohi’s conviction.
It was unclear exactly how much longer Alo-Kaonohi could be required to spend behind bars.
Aki’s appeal, along with prosecutors’ cross-appeal of Aki’s sentence of about four years, were voluntarily dismissed, court records show.
Kunzelman’s wife, Lori Kunzelman, told The Associated Press on Thursday that she is glad prosecutors pushed for a longer sentence.
The Kunzelmans purchased a dilapidated, oceanfront house because they wanted to leave Arizona after Lori Kunzelman’s multiple sclerosis diagnosis.
“We had vacationed on Maui year after year — loved, loved, loved Maui,” she said, noting that they saw the home as an affordable opportunity that her husband could fix up.
She said the beating of her husband destroyed her marriage, explaining that her husband suffered brain injuries that led them to go through a divorce.
Christopher Kunzelman was traveling in Europe and unavailable to address the ruling.
The pair still own the property but they do not know what to do with it, Lori Kunzelman said.
“The families there won’t allow anybody to step foot on that property,” she said. “There’s so much animosity.”
The use of the word, “haole,” a Hawaiian word with meanings that include foreigner and white person, was central to the case. Dennis Kunzelman testified that the men called him “haole” in a derogatory way.
Attorneys for Alo-Kaonohi and Aki said it was Christopher Kunzelman’s entitled and disrespectful attitude that irked them, not his race.
The Hawaii Innocence Project plans to take up the case, according to the group’s co-director, Kenneth Lawson. The organization seeks to argue that an ineffective defense did not present to the jury the history of the word “haole” in Hawaii to show it is not a derogatory term.
“I just don’t believe that it’s a hate crime,” Lawson said.
Lawson also said the defense should have called white, non-Hawaiian residents as witnesses to testify that they lived in the village without any racial issues.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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