In The Courts

In 1994, the Supreme Court of Hawaiʻi held in State v. Kekona that the due process clause of the Hawai‘i Constitution does not require custodial interrogations to be recorded. More than 30 years later, with advances in technology that have made recording far easier, this case asks whether this decision should be reconsidered. The ACLU’s State Supreme Court Initiative, along with the ACLU of Hawai‘i filed an amicus brief arguing that the Supreme Court of Hawaiʻi should now hold that custodial interrogations must be recorded in order to be admissible in court, either as a matter of due process or as an exercise of the Court’s supervisory authority over lower courts.