Preventing Prison Rapes: The Fight For Video Cameras At Hawaii’s Women’s Prison Continues 0 Poor video monitoring in the facility’s control stations has been an issue for years and a recent inspection found only 40% of the cameras worked.
Lawyers for current and former inmates who were sexually assaulted at the women’s prison in Kailua years ago are again asking a federal court judge to order the state to finally install cameras in the control booths at the prison, where they say many of the assaults occurred.
Lawyers Terrance Revere and Richard Wilson are also asking for a default judgment in the women’s favor in a lawsuit they filed over the assaults, or a new trial in the case. They argue the state Attorney General’s Office withheld important evidence in both a 2020 jury trial that ended in a mistrial, and also in a second trial that ended last month.
The jury in that second trial in November found that Eric Tanaka, the former warden of the Women’s Community Correctional Center, was not liable for the actions of prison staff who were involved in the assaults. Lawyers for the women had been seeking more than $8 million in damages, but the federal court jury awarded them nothing.
Revere and Wilson earlier this month renewed their previous request that U.S. District Court Judge Jill Otake order the state to install cameras in the control booths at the women’s prison.
Court filings allege there were more than 50 sexual assaults of inmates by staff at the prison in 2015 and 2016, and about two dozen of those occurred in the prison control stations.
