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If a car hadn’t driven past the pineapple field one night in March 2009, a young woman says she’s certain her pimp would have killed her.

Joseph Vaimili was to have been tried in what prosecutors called one of Honolulu’s higher-profile human trafficking cases. But on the day of opening arguments last month, Vaimili didn’t show up. While the manhunt for him continues, so too can his trial.

A key witness is the 24-year-old¹, who states in police records she knew Vaimili as “Joe Blo,” but didn’t know he was a pimp when she began talking to him at Waikiki’s Zanzabar Night Club in February 2009. Shortly after their first conversation, she says Vaimili forced her to work “the track,” a prostitution route down Kuhio Avenue, and give him everything she earned.

Over the next month, Vaimili beat her unconscious and dragged her down a Waikiki alleyway, choked her, left deep bruises and welts across her body from whipping her with his Gucci belt. He broke a hotel-room lamp — under which he instructed her to leave the money she earned — by smashing it against her skull.

On that late March night, after Vaimili forced her to the ground in the field, she says she tried to beg him for her life with the barrel of his silver automatic handgun in her mouth. He told her repeatedly how easy it would be for him to kill her and how easily he could bury her body beneath the rows of pineapples stretching out beside them.

Honolulu police arrested Vaimili a week later at the Golden Queen, a Ward Avenue massage parlor that’s still operating despite repeated police raids that resulted in prostitution arrests there in recent years. He was charged with the kinds of offenses that Honolulu prosecutors typically use against pimps and other human trafficking offenders: two counts of kidnapping, terroristic threatening, promoting prostitution and firearms.

Not long after his arrest, Vaimili was freed on $250,000 bail. In April 2010, prosecutors asked that he be detained, arguing that he had violated the terms of his release by traveling out of state. But Circuit Court Judge Randal Lee denied that request, instead imposing bond conditions including a nightly 10:30 p.m. curfew.

Prosecutors say Vaimili had appeared for all of his court dates since his 2009 arrest. But he didn’t show when it came time for his trial to begin on June 23, and missed a subsequent date June 28. His whereabouts are unknown.

Hawaii State Public Safety officials tasked with electronically monitoring his curfew say his disappearance is not their fault.

“It’s important to remember that electronic monitoring is for curfew purposes only, not for high-risk offenders,” said Corrections Division Deputy Director Tommy Johnson. “It’s a passive system. It’s not a system that has GPS or 24/7 monitoring. It’s only for compliance with curfew. The person has to have a single line phone, and has to be within so many feet (of the) phone for the unit to record at certain times.”

Prosecutors won’t speak on the record about whether Vaimili could have gotten through airport security to leave the island. The city’s prosecuting attorney arguing the case says she can’t speak to anything beyond the legal process while the trial is ongoing. Vaimili’s court-appointed attorney, Jeffrey Arakaki, says he has “no comment whatsoever.”

Local victims advocates contend that stronger prostitution laws and a felony human trafficking law might have helped prosecutors keep Vaimili behind bars.

“His bail was set very low,” said Kathryn Xian, co-founder of the nonprofit Pacific Alliance to Stop Slavery, or PASS. “Why? Because you have to prove that there is actual physical threat to the victim, and by statute, the victim is seen as a prostitute. So the social bias within the judiciary system, or the law enforcement system, will look at her as a criminal. It’s an occupational hazard.”

Xian is frustrated because Gov. Linda Lingle this week vetoed what would have been Hawaii’s first law criminalizing human trafficking. Prosecutors and law enforcement had opposed it, saying it would have been unenforceable.

Vaimili was constitutionally protected from being held in jail or forced to pay what would be deemed an unreasonably high bond before his trial.

“Of course people are presumed to be innocent until they’re convicted,” said Jon Van Dyke, a constitutional law professor at the University of Hawaii’s William S. Richardson School of Law. “The Bill of Rights says you can’t hold people without offering them a reasonable bail.”

Prosecutors say the bail in Vaimili’s case was standard and reasonable under the circumstances.

Van Dyke also explained that Vailmili’s presence during jury selection opened the door to a rarely available legal rule: Prosecutors can move forward with his trial despite his absence.

“The trial can continue because you’ve made your initial appearance,” said Van Dyke. “It would be too terrible if people could just block their trials by not showing up one day. In fact, most people who escape are eventually caught. There isn’t that much of an incentive to flee because they catch you sooner or later, and your punishment is much more severe if you jump bail. It’s not a smart thing to do.”

The Corrections Division’s Johnson said his staff would have to conduct arduous research in order to determine how many suspected criminals under state supervision jump bail each year.

“It’s hard to nail that down,” said Johnson, who emphasized that the Corrections Division simply follows court orders.

The judge’s decision to move forward with a trial in absentia on July 12 is significant, said Deputy Prosecutor Megan Kau.

“It is rare,” said Kau. “It does not happen very often. However, in this case, because of the severity of the charges and the fact that the defendant was present (for jury selection). We proceed with or without him, the same way, until we pick up the defendant. Of course, that would be at an unknown time.”