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In 1957, when Hawaii was still a territory, it abolished capital punishment and joined only six states that had done so. Like many social processes and events in the islands, race played a highly significant role in both dispensing and eliminating the death penalty.

Between 1900 and 1944, when the last execution occurred, 42 people were put to death by hanging in Hawaii. All were men and 24 were Filipino. 

The others were seven Japanese, six Koreans, three Puerto Ricans, one Native Hawaiian and one white. Filipinos were vastly overrepresented among those executed since they were at most one-sixth of the territory’s population before World War II.

The overrepresentation of Filipinos among those hanged was not necessarily because there were more criminals among them but because they were racially demonized as prone to violence, criminally inclined and emotionally volatile.

This widespread stereotyping of Filipino men made juries quite willing to convict them of first-degree murder, which carried a mandatory death sentence.

In contrast, whites could escape execution by being charged with a lesser crime than first-degree murder, as in the infamous Massie-Kahahawai case of 1931-1932, or even by not being found guilty of any crime.

The only white person who was executed was John O’Connell, a mentally ill Irishman, who in 1906 was convicted of brutally killing a 3-year-old boy from a prominent white family.

In the case of Native Hawaiians, convicted murderers often avoided being hanged because territorial governors commuted their death sentences to life in prison to maintain Native Hawaiian support for white Republican politicians. 

This arrangement was part of the political alliance between Native Hawaiians and white Republicans that was established after the in which the Home Rule Party led and supported by Native Hawaiians emerged victorious over the Republican Party dominated by whites.

Two young Native Hawaiians who benefited from the alliance with whites were James Majors and John Palakiko. The end of capital punishment in Hawaii is often connected to what became . 

In 1948 the two men were charged with first-degree murder and rape of Therese Wilder, a 68-year-old wealthy widow who lived alone on a two-acre estate in Nuuanu Valley.

While serving 10-year sentences for burglary in Oahu Prison, Majors and Palakiko escaped from a work gang in Chinatown and caught a bus to the end of the line in the valley. 

First-Degree Murder Meant The Death Penalty

The following evening, they broke into Wilder’s home to get some food and, after being confronted by her, they beat her and bound and gagged her with a towel. Following his capture the next day, Palakiko admitted his role and said that Majors had raped Wilder.

After her body was found four days later, the city medical examiner pronounced the cause of death as suffocation because of the towel tied around her mouth and nose. He also said he could not find any evidence that she had been sexually assaulted because of the advanced decomposition of her body.

After a six-day trial, Majors and Palakiko were found guilty of first-degree murder and promptly sentenced to be hanged. The primary evidence against them included alleged “confessions” made by them to the police following their arrest.

During a Hawaii Supreme Court hearing of an appeal of their conviction, Palakiko testified that he admitted assaulting Wilder and said Majors had raped her after being beaten by a Honolulu police detective, Vernal Stevens.

Majors testified at the hearing that Stevens had threatened to beat him and that he was not shown copies of the statements he had purportedly made to the police.

As a result of those and other blatant injustices in their convictions, a multiracial coalition emerged to have the death sentences given to Majors and Palakiko commuted to life in prison.

The coalition consisted of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, Native Hawaiian homesteaders, Democratic Party leaders and Christian ministers. The racial makeup included whites among the Protestant ministers and Democratic Party officials, such as John Burns and Harriet Bouslog; and Native Hawaiians, Filipinos, Japanese and Portuguese among the ILWU and Democratic Party supporters.

Bouslog started the organized campaign to have petitions and letters requesting the commutation of the death sentences sent to the territory’s Democratic governor, Oren E. Long. 

She and her law firm, Bouslog and Symonds, later became pro bono attorneys for the two convicted murderers and filed appeals on their behalf to the Hawaii Supreme Court, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals and the U.S. Supreme Court.

These appeals were all unsuccessful, but they raised significant issues of racial injustice in the case, which led Republican Gov. Samuel Wilder King (no relation to Therese Wilder) in 1954 to reduce the death sentences of Majors and Palakiko to life in prison with the possibility of parole.

Democratic Revolution Of 1954

Five months later in the November elections, of the territorial Legislature for the first time in Hawaii history. 

They immediately introduced bills in both the House of Representatives and the Senate that would end capital punishment. Democrats were fully aware that the death penalty had been used overwhelmingly against people of color in the territory, their primary supporters. 

Representatives of the same multiracial coalition that had earlier advocated commutation of Majors and Palakiko’s death sentences spoke in favor of the bills. However, the final version of the law that was adopted let the jury decide if convicted murderers should be executed or receive a life sentence without the possibility of parole. 

Hence in 1957, the Democrats passed another bill that , which King signed into law.

Since then, multiracial coalitions have been organized by Hawaii’s people to advance their common interests beginning with statehood in 1959.

Coalition Building Can Be The Answer To Many Problems

The , in which the great majority of delegates were nonpoliticians, adopted several amendments to the state constitution for the benefit of Native Hawaiians, which later were approved by Hawaii voters. 

These amendments included recognition of olelo Hawaii as an official language of the state besides English, establishment of the Office of Hawaiian Affairs and protection of traditional gathering rights on undeveloped private land.

A more recent example of a successful multiracial alliance was the recent protests at Mauna Kea that stalled planned construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope. While the protests were led and organized by Native Hawaiians, representatives of just about every racial and ethnic group in the islands very likely participated in or supported that struggle.

Multiracial coalitions can serve as an effective model of how we can address the critical problems and issues that currently confront us, such as the lack of affordable housing, ethnic inequality, the need for economic diversification, homelessness and Native Hawaiian land rights. 

Such coalition building need not be mobilized under the leadership of the local Democratic Party since it is no longer the racially progressive party that it was in the 1950s and 1960s. At present, many Democratic state legislators pursue their own personal and political agendas and objectives, while ignoring those of their party and its members and supporters.

As occurred in the coordinated campaign to have the death sentences given to Majors and Palakiko commuted, multiracial and multisectoral coalitions can be organized among diverse groups and individuals to work together in pursuit of their shared goals and values of racial justice and equality.