The Hawaii Supreme Court reversed the July 1, 2024, Intermediate Court of Appeals’ decision and upheld an Oahu Circuit Court’s July 20, 2022, conviction of Erik Willis for second-degree attempted murder in the 2020 stabbing of a 17-year-old girl sunbathing at Kahala Beach.
The high court’s unanimous opinion Tuesday rejected Willis’s claim of prosecutorial misconduct. Comments by the deputy prosecuting attorney during closing arguments “did not rise to the level of prosecutorial misconduct, ” the court said.
The appeals court had sent the case back to the lower court for another trial.
“The (deputy prosecuting attorney’s ) challenged comments, viewed in context, were based upon reasonable inferences from the evidence adduced at trial, ” the opinion says, adding “there is no reasonable possibility that these comments … alone might have affected the trial’s outcome.”
Tuesday’s opinion, penned by Chief Justice Mark Recktenwald and signed by the four associate justices, explains the factual background in order to give context to the closing arguments in question.
The teenage girl had been sunbathing on Kahala Beach about 1 :30 p.m. July 8, 2020, when an unknown person pinned her down from behind, covered her mouth and repeatedly stabbed her in the neck as she lay on her stomach. She suffered life-threatening injuries, but survived.
The Circuit Court granted Willis’s motion to suppress evidence, including DNA obtained from blood stains on Willis’s right shoe that prosecutor’s said matched the DNA of the girl, as well as statements obtained at the time of his arrest. The decision was based on the fact that Honolulu Police Department officers without permission or a search warrant had entered the Niu Valley home where Willis was living.
The Supreme Court upheld that decision when the state appealed the matter, so jurors never learned during trial about the actual blood evidence. The state had to rely on witness testimony and circumstantial evidence at trial.
The state presented several witnesses along with surveillance video tying Willis to the scene and along the route to and from his house.
Willis had been identified, based on surveillance video from a city bus, by a landscaper who testified a man in surveillance video was the same one he had seen washing himself off at a sink near the scene of the attack before running off. But the landscaper did not mention blood.
The teenage victim testified she arrived at the beach at about 1 :20 p.m., and that she saw a man walk toward her, then walk past her. She described him as having “brown, poofy hair, ” wearing a white T-shirt, light-colored jeans and a blue surgical mask. She said she noticed his eyes and his “bushy eyebrows.”
Later as she lay on her stomach on the beach, she said she felt a hand cover her mouth and a weight on her back before feeling sharp stabbing in her neck. She said she counted that she was stabbed 15 times. When she was able to move, she said she turned to look in the Ewa direction and saw the man running away.
She identified her attacker in surveillance video taken from 4671 Kahala Avenue nearby ; and she identified Willis in the courtroom.
The defense presented no evidence, no witnesses and Willis declined to testify.
Deputy Prosecutor Lawrence Sousie focused on the brutal attack during closing arguments. He then recounted the testimony and the video surveillance, piecing together the state’s timeline that Willis took the bus from his Niu Valley home to Kahala Beach, where he attacked the teenager, went to a nearby sink to wash up, tried to wash the blood out of his white shirt and disappeared for two hours, hiding and waiting.
He said a witness had testified she saw a man get up from the teenager’s back, and she noticed something on his white shirt.
“What could it be ?” Sousie says. “Blood ? There was plenty of blood. … We don’t know.”
Two motions for acquittal by Willis’s attorney, Eric Seitz, were denied.
Seitz argued in his closing there was no direct evidence, no witness who saw the attack, no weapon recovered, and no suspect was found after HPD searched the area. No witness had identified the person in the video that shows someone washing his hands at the sink.
Seitz accused Sousie of prosecutorial misconduct for saying in his closing : “So we don’t know whether he washed the shirt at the sink, but we know from (the landscaper ) that he washed his hands and his face … because he had blood on them.”
The state argued and the Supreme Court agreed after hearing the audiotape that the significant pause that comes before the phrase “because he had blood on them, ” was a signal to the jury the deputy prosecutor was arguing an inference regarding the presence of blood.
The state also argued the deputy prosecutor was merely drawing a reasonable inference based on the circumstantial evidence at trial, and that it would be implausible that the jury would have believed the landscaper testified the man had blood on his face and hands just because the deputy prosecutor said it.
Seitz said HPD did not seize or analyze the sink, nor connect it to Willis, and the deputy prosecutor should not have “rhetorically asked the jury to speculate about the person at the sink and the presence of blood.”
The Supreme Court said prosecutors are forbidden from introducing new evidence in closing arguments, but are not prohibited from crafting arguments based on the evidence in the record, and are afforded wide latitude in closing, and may discuss and comment and draw reasonable inferences from the evidence.
Correction :—An earlier version of this story misspelled Deputy Prosecutor Lawrence Sousie’s first name.