HAWAIIHELL

HAWAII IS A DYSTOPIAN HELL

For people who believe in democracy, free speech and the rule of law, Hawaii is a dystopian hell. As I will show, even the governor, who is a medical doctor, will not defend the rights of consumer advocates to protest the dangerous scams of health fraudsters who sell phony miracle cures and endanger the public with anti-vaccine lies.

Maui Mayor’s Health Fraud Festival

In 1994, shortly after I moved to Maui from Oahu, Linda Lingle, then Mayor of Maui County, conspired with a group of con artists to defraud thousands of people. They organized an all-day festival of fraudulent medicine that they called a women’s health conference. It was apparent from promotional material for the event that it would not feature any real health professionals like medical doctors, nurses and nutritionists with real credentials, but only quacks and snake oil peddlers. Lingle had previously promoted a fraudulent diagnostic system using Kirlian photography. The Maui News aided and abetted the fraud by publishing a two-page promotional article that made deceptive and preposterous claims.

I paid the $35 to register for the event and prepared a flyer to distribute as attendees filed in. Here are some excerpts and paraphrases of what it said.

Text of My Flyer

Warning. The Maui County Women’s Conference is dangerous to your health and your bank account. It promotes the health fraud industry’s agenda and excludes evidence-based health care.

Mayor Linda Lingle participated with The Maui New in the promotion of Kirlian photography for the diagnosis of diseases and nutritional deficiencies. This is an illegal, immoral, worthless, fraudulent scheme to steal thousands of dollars from gullible victims. I begged her to retract her endorsement but she refused.

Several of the lectures are presented by people who lack the credentials they claim to have and fraudulently call themselves “Dr.” but have no MD or PhD. 

One of the presenters, Kathy Johnson, promotes the wonders of the “healing crystals” that she sells in her shop. She has no credentials in any health-related field, and her crystals do not emanate energy or heal anything. It’s a fraud, a money-making scam.

Promotions for the event fraudulently claim that the featured speakers are “the world’s greatest health and wellness experts”. They are actually widely ridiculed and reviled by responsible health care professionals.

One of these “great experts” is Deepak Chopra, who claims his mind-body medicine can make his clients literally immortal and claims that he and thousands of other TMers (Transcendental Meditation practitioners) can levitate and fly. Neither he nor anyone else has demonstrated this ability to levitate or fly.

Another featured speaker, Michio Kushi, has no credentials in any health-care profession, but he is the leader the quasi-religious cult of macrobiotics. His remedies include baked cockroaches and baked hair. He says the nutritional value of foods are due more to their shape than to their chemical components. He claims people can live on nothing but rice because the body can make all other essential nutrients from rice. Besides being paid to fly to Hawaii and speak at the conference, he has a side hustle of providing consultations for $800 per hour.

Speaker Jeremy Safron fraudulently claims that people can live for decades without eating at all, just drinking water.

One of the exhibiters showed off her Q-Systems device, which consists of a headband with several electrodes attached to it and then to a computer. She claims it can detect and diagnose all ailments, including infections, cancers, genetic defects and nutritional deficiencies. She can then reverse the current and cure whatever ailments are detected. There are many other exhibits and speakers promoting dangerous and worthless nonsense and frauds.    (End Flyer Text)

I’m Threatened with Arrest for Asking Questions

I stood at the entrance to the hotel where the conference was being held and had handed out only about 20 flyers when I noticed one of the organizers confiscating them all from attendees. She then crumpled them up, hurried to confront me and threw them at my feet. She ordered me to leave. I showed her my ticket and said I have a right to be there.

There were so many speakers that three or four “seminars” were held simultaneously through the day. I could only sample a few. One speaker was a dishonest or delusional crystal healer, Kathy Johnson. Mayor Lingle also happened to be in the audience. 

When the woman had run out of tall tales about her crystals healing diseases and making appliances and vehicles run better, and about an angel who tells her which crystals heal which diseases, she asked if anyone had any questions. No one else did, so I stood up and politely asked whether she had any kind of evidence for her claims. She rudely rebuffed me, saying I could buy the crystals and test them myself.

I politely asked how she knew that the angel advising her wasn’t a dream or fantasy. At that Lingle hurried out of the auditorium to tell a security guard to call the police. I was puzzled and soon learned that she wanted me arrested for “disrupting the conference”. A security guard told me this when I left the auditorium.

Within minutes I heard sirens. Soon several police officers arrived. I managed to evade them for a while, but two of them eventually caught up to me and said I wasn’t allowed to attend any more of the lectures. I showed them my ticket and said if I were arrested or interfered with, I would sue them, the county and the mayor. Only then did they leave me alone.

Lingle later became Governor. During her two terms she continued to pursue her agenda of making Hawaii a haven for quacks and promoting health-fraud tourism.

The health fraud festival was my introduction to a county that has no place for free speech or the rule of law. It would get much worse.

        Hawaii Runs a Protection Racket for Health Fraudsters

Even the Governor, a Medical Doctor, is Complicit

The owners of the Kahului Alive and Well Health Emporium, Dennis and Mona Jones, have been defrauding and endangering Maui residents for at least 20 years. They sell a wide variety of nutritional supplements and herbal drugs that they claim can cure any and all ailments including heart disease, Alzheimer’s, cancers, and even HIV/AIDS.

The Joneses also rail against vaccines with fantastic lies and urge people to never let their kids get vaccinated for anything. You may as well get injected with the AIDS virus as get any vaccination. Instead of getting vaccinated you should go to their store and buy a hundred dollars’ worth of pills every few weeks. They promote their lies and frauds on their hour-long radio infomercials that run twice each week.

I have tried to get the state health department to put a stop to their scams but they ignore me. The head of this department, Dr. Lorrin Pang, is a crackpot conspiracy theorist who gives talks about the “chemtrails” that the government is using to poison our soil, our bodies and our minds.

I have occasionally tried to educate people like I did with Lingle’s health fraud festival described at the beginning of this essay. I would stand on the sidewalk outside the store holding a sign and offering flyers warning of the dangers of the frauds.

The Joneses also rail against modern cancer treatments and say cancer patients should buy their supplements and go to clinics in Mexico for “natural treatments”. This, they say, is what most doctors do. They tell made-up stories about how specific people were cured of cancer and other diseases by their supplements.

One was cured of prostate cancer, another was cured of advanced esophageal cancer, and two men were cured of HIV/AIDS with blood tests proving the virus had been eliminated. A boy was cured of autism and severe seizures in 36 hours. A woman was cured of diabetes in just two weeks.

A man and a woman were cured of Alzheimer’s disease, a woman was cured of metastatic breast cancer and another woman was cured of crippling arthritis in just four days, and another was cured of lupus. Others have been cured of schizophrenia. One of their products, they say, dissolves and digests arterial plaque from all parts of the body including the brain, heart and kidneys. “It works for everyone in all instances,” Dennis said. Of course, the stories are fabricated from thin air.

Here is a small sample of the hazards of their pills and potions besides leading people astray and away from real therapies.

Excessive vitamin A can weaken bones and damage the liver.

Excessive vitamin B6 can cause nerve damage.

Excessive vitamin D can damage the kidneys and other organs.

Excessive vitamin E can promote various cancers.

For much more on the dangers of the Jones’ scams, see

www.KillerLies.blogspot.com.

As if all this fraud were enough, Alive and Well owners Dennis and Mona Jones are also SNAP fraudsters. They illegally accept SNAP EBT payments for the snake oil supplements.  I have reported this ongoing fraud to the SNAP fraud division a dozen times and never received a reply. No action has been taken against them.

The question that naturally occurs is why does the state allow this? The answer is simple. The state is in on the scam. It aids and abets the frauds because it gets a cut in the form of excise taxes from the business and income taxes from the store’s many employees. It’s a protection racket.

Cops Won’t Arrest My Assailant Because He is Their Friend

Alive and Well prepares to stage a day-long promotional party on Saturday, March 24, with music and free samples. To ensure that I wouldn’t spoil their promotion by displaying a skeptical sign or offering critical flyers, Alive and Well hire a young (19 years old), very large (310 pounds) and very naïve security guard named Clinton Myers. They tell him the same lies they had told county employees and the courts for years – that I had a history of harassing their customers, blocking their driveway, trespassing and interfering with their business.

 I have never done any of these things. I have only demonstrated and offered flyers legally on a public sidewalk, as is my right under the First Amendment. 

They also tell him the additional lies that I had been convicted of felony assault for an incident in 2003 and that there was a standing court order forbidding me from demonstrating. It was Myers’ job to enforce the order and keep me out of the area that day. Myers would later tell me and then the police all this. 

Shortly before I arrive on the public sidewalk near the store, I take the flyers from my shoulder bag and unroll my sign. But before I could offer the flyers or display the sign Clinton Myers and his partner Jason Keefner come out of the store and approach me in a threatening manner. 

Myers orders me off the sidewalk and out of the area. He says that his friends who own the store hired him to keep me away for the day. When I refuse to leave, he viciously assaults and batters me, causing severe injuries, and violently detains me. During the assault Keefner snatches my flyers and tosses them into a dumpster in the parking lot.

 When police officers Samuel Gasmen and Mary Sagawinit arrive, they witness Myers violently pressing me onto the sidewalk with all of his 320 pounds as I gasp for air and ask for help. Myers did not release me until Officer Sagawinit told him to get off of me. When he does so, instead of arresting Myers the officers greet him warmly and Gasmen shakes his hand, congratulating him for taking down the bad guy Butler. It turns out, they are old family friends.

 I urge the officers to question the Joneses about their involvement in the incident. They refuse. I ask Officer Gasmen to fetch my flyers out of the dumpster, which was on Alive and Well property. He refuses. I then ask him to at least look into the dumpster and bear witness that they were there. He refuses. Sagawinit shakes her head no, she won’t do it either.

 Minutes later I experience severe pain in my lower rib area and my left shoulder, and I go home. The pain increases over the weekend and Monday I’m diagnosed with four rib fractures and referred to physical therapy for my shoulder. I was later diagnosed with a severely torn rotator cuff. My left arm hung like dead weight and hurt constantly. It would take a 5-hour surgical procedure, 30 physical therapy sessions and 17 months for the shoulder to heal, the pain to end, and nearly full strength and function to return.

 The police had witnessed the brutal assault on me by a man twice my size and one third my age. It occurred on a public sidewalk. I could have been killed by suffocation or a broken rib piercing a vital organ. I had no weapon, had committed no crime, and could not have been deemed to pose a risk to Myers, anyone else or anyone’s property. There was no possible justification for the assault, yet the police did not arrest the assailant or even treat him as a suspect. Instead, they treated him like a fellow law enforcement officer while they treated me with rudeness, hostility and belligerence.

 Sagawinit’s report quotes Myers as insisting that a court order forbids my demonstration, but when she learned this was not true, she did not follow up and ask him who told him the lie, then investigate the Joneses who thereby manipulated and tricked Myers into harassing and assaulting me. This was a clear violation of HRS 702-222 and 702-223, complicity and responsibility for the crime of another.

 The officers quote Myers as saying he “escorted” me (violently carried me fully off the ground in a dangerous full-nelson hold) from the area because I refused to leave. They failed to ask Myers by what authority he ordered me to leave the public sidewalk, and then used violence against me to enforce his order.

 About two weeks after the incident, I showed my medical records to the police. They changed the incident report classification from “assault III” to “assault II” and referred the case to the prosecutor. I again asked them to investigate the Joneses for hiring Myers to commit crimes against me, but they refused.

 As the months went by with no word of an arrest or grand jury hearing, I occasionally called the prosecutor’s office for an update. I was always told to be patient because the case is moving forward. They were lying to me.

 About a year after the incident, I asked for a personal meeting with the prosecutor in charge of the case. I met with Deputy Prosecuting Attorney Gerrie Sheppard and learned that she had not yet read the police reports (a year after the assault!) and knew almost nothing about the case. No grand jury had been convened. Myers still had not been arrested or charged. Then Sheppard questioned me in a hostile manner about my demonstrating, as if I was the criminal.

 I said I have the same right to sign-wave as politicians and I deserve the same protection of the law. Sheppard said she did not like my attitude, ordered me out of her office and told me to never come back.

The Prosecutor’s office never called me in for an interview. I was seriously injured in an assault witnessed by police officers, but they had no interest in hearing me out, much less holding the assailants accountable.

Dennis and Mona Jones not only get away with defrauding people every day, the got away with conspiring to commit a violent crime against me and committing that crime through their proxy. This would not happen to a politician or a high-profile celebrity. As I said, there is no rule of law or equal justice under the law here.

 There can be no doubt that if I had been killed, no charges would have been filed, the Jones and Myers would not have been held accountable. They had essentially been issued a license to murder me. 

I sued the Joneses and their business for my injuries. I had to represent myself because I did not have $10,000 to retain an attorney. I had a solid case but my lawsuit was sabotaged and justice obstructed by the county’s Office of Corporation Counsel. I have no doubt Lutey was bribed to obstruct justice in my case, and there is no doubt who did the bribing.

 This crime is recounted in detail here:

www.MoanaLutey.blogspot.com

 Lutey is a brazen criminal who became Corporation Counsel. The mayor knows she is a criminal, but nominated her anyway. The Council Members know she is a criminal, but rubberstamped her nomination anyway. I was not allowed to testify at the hearing on her nomination. By appointing her, the county has ensured there will be no rule of law here. She later became county Elections Director, the highest-paying position in the county.

She has never denied my allegations. Why would anyone trust this criminal to run fair elections?

Alive and Well owners Dennis and Mona Jones are criminal fraudsters as described, but also SNAP fraudsters. They illegally accept SNAP EBT payments for the snake oil supplements they fraudulent sell as cures for everything, including HIV, Alzheimer’s, etc.  I have reported this ongoing fraud to the SNAP fraud division a dozen times and never received a reply. No action has been taken against them.

The state aids and abets the fraud because it gets a cut in the form of excise taxes and income taxes from the store’s many employees. It’s essentially a protection racket.

My main grievance and the primary focus of this essay is the corrupt alliance between the government and the health fraud industry, the protection racket the government runs to get a share of the fruits of the frauds. However, I must briefly mention several other incidents that illustrate the government’s contempt for the rule of law.

 I was victimized by several other instances of the police refusing, out of corruption, stupidity or laziness, to refer crimes against me to the prosecutor. For example, during an argument about the rent my drug-addled landlord assaulted me with a flurry of punches to the head and body. I called the police. An officer came to the house, took notes on my complaint, saw my bloodied face and left. The assailant did not deny my account of the incident and had no explanation for his assault and battery. Still, I was never contacted by the prosecutor’s office. There was no prosecution and no explanation.

 In another case a career criminal ripped me off for nine days of labor renovating a cottage. When I tried to get her to pay me, she filed a perjured TRO full of outrageous lies. It was granted ex parte. She then tricked the police into arresting me. When they went to talk to her, she pretended to live in a house she did not live in that would have put me within the forbidden 100 feet of her. The stupid police did not even read the address on the TRO. I was arrested and spent 30 days in jail.

 When a judge heard the case, he called her a liar and dissolved the TRO. When I was released, I went to the police station and tried to make a complaint against the woman for perjury. The police said they do not investigate complaints of perjury. No, not even when the criminal lies cost me 30 days in jail. The Corporation Counsel and the Chief of Police would later commit perjury by claiming that complaints of perjury are investigated like any other crime. See above link re Moana Lutey.

 In another case I was walking to Ace Hardware store in Kula when I noticed two huge rottweilers running loose on a grassy knoll across the street. When they saw me, they started running in my direction. There was no house nearby or a tree to climb. I recognized the dogs as belonging to a neighbor who kept them in cages because, I was told, they are dangerous. 

I was terrified and braced myself to be mauled. Out of sheer luck, a VW bus came speeding around a bend and ran over the lead dog two seconds from attacking me. The other one ran off. The injured dog limped after it. The woman driver stopped and profusely apologized. She thought they were my dogs going for a walk with me. I explained what really happened and thanked her for saving me from being killed in the most horrible way imaginable.

 I quickly jogged home and called the police. I told them what had happened, where the dogs lived and the name of the vet then caring for the injured dog, who I had located by calling the nearest vets. They refused to investigate further, claiming they couldn’t talk to the vet because the dog had vet-pet confidentiality rights. This is the kind of lawless insanity I have endured for years.

 In each of these instances I wrote up detailed chronologies of these crimes and took them to the prosecutor’s office, I was rebuffed and my chronologies returned with the admonition, “All complaints must go through the police.”

 How can it be that police officers, who may be corrupted by bribery or by friendship with a criminal or dislike of a crime victim and are often ignorant of the law, are the sole arbiters of whether a criminal case is pursued?

 Criminals can endlessly appeal convictions, but their victims’ complaints can be dismissed by one cop who is not an attorney and may be corrupt or too lazy to do the paperwork and go to court. This makes no sense. It is clear that reform is badly needed. Crime victims must be given at least a fraction of the due process given to perpetrators.

 We need a process by which crime victims can appeal decisions to not prosecute and to not even do a proper investigation. We all know that criminal defendants have a right to due process. But what about due process for crime victims? When a crime victim is denied justice in this way it is almost impossible for him or her to find representation for a civil lawsuit. Attorneys are reluctant to take such a case without a large retainer if there has not been a conviction. The victim is thereby denied both criminal and civil justice. This is obviously not right.

 Police and prosecutors should be required to interview victims of crimes in which there has been significant injury, and to record the interviews. This is nothing more than requiring them to comply with their oath of office. It’s embarrassing for a state to have to enact such a law, but that’s what we have come to.

 A related reform would be this: When the police refuse to properly investigate, the crime victim can go straight to the prosecutor with a written account of the crime.

 Haunted by the grief crime victims endure at the hands of corrupt and stupid cops, I proposed a crime victims’ reform bill and sent it to a dozen key state legislators. Here are some of the points I made to them. 

My Proposal For Crime Victims Reform

 The following proposed bill was drafted by a highly-respected Hawaii attorney. The number assigned would place the law in the appropriate section of the Hawaii Revised Statutes.

……………………………………………………………………….

HRS § 801D-8.        

   Right to a charging decision; written reasons; petition for review.

(a) Purpose. In recognition that timely, transparent charging decisions promote public confidence and the effective participation of victims and witnesses, this section establishes a limited right for a complaining witness to obtain a formal charging decision and, if declined, a confined avenue of judicial review that respects prosecutorial discretion.

(b) Definitions. For purposes of this section:
(1) “Complaining witness” means a natural person who reports conduct constituting a potential criminal offense and who attests to facts supporting probable cause.
(2) “Prosecuting authority” means the department of the attorney general or a county prosecuting attorney, as applicable.

(c) Request for charging decision. Upon written request by a complaining witness filed with the prosecuting authority and copied to the court of competent jurisdiction, the prosecuting authority shall, within sixty days, issue a written charging decision either:
(1) Approving the initiation of criminal proceedings by complaint, information, or indictment; or
(2) Declining to initiate criminal proceedings.

(d) Written reasons. A declination shall briefly state the principal reasons, which may include evidentiary insufficiency, legal insufficiency, resource-allocation, or public-interest considerations. The statement need not disclose privileged work product, confidential informants, or information the disclosure of which would materially impair an ongoing investigation.

(e) Petition for review. Within thirty days after service of a declination, the complaining witness may file a petition for review in the circuit court. The court’s review shall be confined to the declination decision and the specific grounds of error raised by the complaining witness.

(f) Standard and scope.
(1) If the declination rests on legal error (including an erroneous view of the elements, statute of limitations, or jurisdiction), the court may remand to the prosecuting authority with instructions to reconsider under the correct law.
(2) If the declination rests on policy or resource-allocation, the court shall not substitute its judgment for that of the prosecuting authority and shall deny the petition unless the decision was arbitrary, capricious, or made without consideration of the facts supplied.

(g) Remedies. The court may (i) affirm the declination; (ii) remand for reconsideration consistent with the court’s legal ruling; or (iii) in extraordinary cases of persistent legal error, direct the filing of a complaint limited to charges supported by probable cause in the record. Nothing in this section authorizes the court to supervise the conduct of the prosecution after initiation.

(h) Confidentiality. Records filed under this section shall be sealed to the extent necessary to protect non-public investigative materials and the privacy of victims and witnesses, subject to court order.

(i) No private right to prosecute. Nothing in this section creates a private right to conduct a prosecution, to control litigation decisions, or to compel the State to proceed to trial.

(j) Relation to other rights. This section supplements, and does not diminish, the rights in §801D-4 and other applicable law.

Proponent’s Draft Committee Report

Purpose and Intent
The purpose of this bill is to create a limited statutory right for a complaining witness to obtain a formal charging decision from the prosecuting authority and, in the event of a declination, to secure confined judicial review. The intent is to promote transparency, accountability, and public confidence without intruding upon the prosecutor’s core discretion to allocate resources and set enforcement priorities.

Constitutionality and Separation of Powers
The bill respects separation of powers by carefully limiting judicial review to legal errors and arbitrary decision-making, while preserving prosecutorial discretion over policy and resource judgments. The courts are not empowered to compel prosecution beyond correcting legal misunderstandings or remanding for reconsideration. This balance parallels existing doctrines under administrative and habeas review and ensures that prosecutors remain the primary gatekeepers of criminal charging.

Relation to the Hawaiʻi Constitution
Article I, Section 14 of the Hawaiʻi Constitution guarantees due process and open courts. By providing a clear channel for victims and complaining witnesses to request a charging decision, the bill strengthens those guarantees while remaining consistent with Article V’s allocation of executive power. Importantly, nothing in the statute authorizes private prosecution.

Interaction with the Hawaiʻi Rules of Penal Procedure
This statute is designed to supplement, not conflict with, the Hawaiʻi Rules of Penal Procedure. Charging decisions ordinarily result either in the filing of a complaint, information, or indictment, or in a declination accompanied by dismissal. The bill operates upstream of those filings, ensuring that before limitations periods expire, victims and witnesses may trigger a final decision. Once charges are filed, or once a declination is entered with leave of court, the Hawaiʻi Rules continue to govern without alteration.

Comparative Approaches
Other jurisdictions have recognized similar needs for structured review of prosecutorial decisions. For example, several states provide statutory victims’ rights to confer with prosecutors or to receive notice of charging decisions. In limited contexts, courts in states such as New Jersey and Arizona have acknowledged a narrow role for judicial review where a refusal to prosecute rests on clear legal error. These examples demonstrate that carefully framed mechanisms can enhance transparency without displacing prosecutorial discretion, and that Hawaiʻi would not be alone in adopting such a safeguard.

Exclusion of Prior Declinations
This statute also makes clear that the review mechanism does not apply once a prosecutor has already declined charges with leave of court. At that point, judicial oversight has already occurred, and further review would duplicate existing safeguards and risk encroaching on prosecutorial discretion. The statute is thus confined to the investigatory stage where no charge has yet been filed or declined.

The proposed statute provides a narrowly tailored remedy: it creates transparency where none currently exists, protects constitutional rights to habeas and access to courts, and does so without displacing prosecutorial judgment. By drawing clear boundaries around timing, scope, and remedies, the bill strengthens public trust while respecting the constitutional allocation of powers.

(End of text of proposed bill.)

 I sent this proposed bill to a dozen key state legislators as well as the governor, along with the examples I provided herein illustrating that such reform is necessary if “justice for all” is to be more than an empty slogan.

 I concluded, “The bill would give victims of serious crimes a modicum of due process rights, a small fraction of the due process criminals are afforded. I am seeking sponsors for this bill, at least one legislator to introduce it into the legislature.”

 They all completely ignored me without even a courtesy acknowledgement. By not enacting the commonsense reform I suggest, the legislators are saying that they like the corrupt system by which cops can choose to initiate prosecution or not depending on whether they like the assailant or dislike the victim.

 Conclusion

Crime victims should have due process rights as strong as those provided to criminals. My proposed "Crime Victim's Rights Bill" would go a long way to providing this reform. Please contact your legislators and ask them to support it. Email them this whole blog if you want.

Thank your for all the support you can provide.

END