At least 299 people have died in custody in Hawaii

How deaths in custody are reported in Hawaii

Hawaii has no county jails. The Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, called the Department of Public Safety until January 1, 2024, runs the state's four jails, known as community correctional centers, and its four prisons. The Office of Youth Services runs the Hawaii Youth Correctional Facility, the Judiciary runs the juvenile detention home, and the four county police departments hold people in cellblocks after arrest.¹ The department also holds people from Hawaii at Saguaro Correctional Center, a private prison in Eloy, Arizona, owned and run by CoreCivic: about 1,000 people in 2024.¹² Hawaii has sent people in its custody to private prisons on the mainland since 1995.³

Under Act 234 of 2019, the department's director must report each death of a person held in a state or contracted facility to the governor within 48 hours, giving the person's name, gender and age, the place, date and time of death, the cause and any sign of sexual assault, and must report again with the clinical mortality review and the official cause once it is known. Since Act 22 took effect on April 19, 2023, the department must post a copy of each report on its website within seven days.¹⁴ The law leaves out deaths in youth facilities and during arrests, and does not ask for the person's race.¹ The department's page names at least 118 people who died in its custody from 2020 through September 2026.⁴ Its reports often give the cause as "not indicated" or "under investigation," and the age only as a ten-year range.⁵

The Hawaii Correctional System Oversight Commission, an independent five-member body created by Act 179 of 2019, held its first meeting in January 2020 and hired its first staff member in July 2022.⁶⁷ Since October 2022, its oversight coordinator's monthly reports have described each death in custody with the date, time, facility, age, ethnicity and first reported cause, but no name, and its annual reports count them.⁸¹

For the federal Death in Custody Reporting Act, the Attorney General's Crime Prevention and Justice Assistance Division collects reports every quarter and checks the corrections department's reports against the commission's monthly reports and the reports to the governor. In its 2023 plan, it listed six agencies, among them the Department of Law Enforcement and all four county prosecutors' offices, as not taking part, and said the state had no public website for the data.¹

The federal detention center in Honolulu, run by the U.S. Bureau of Prisons, holds people for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) under an agreement with ICE.⁹ ICE publishes its own report on each death in its custody.¹⁰

What has changed

1. 1856-1944Hawaii hanged at least 49 people. Almost all of them were Native Hawaiian, Chinese, Japanese, Filipino or members of other minority groups.¹¹¹²
2. 1944On January 7, the Territory of Hawaii hanged Adriano Domingo, a Filipino man, at Oahu Prison. His lawyers had argued that he was insane; a sanity commission found otherwise, and Governor Ingram Stainback found no reason to spare him.¹³ It was Hawaii's last civilian execution. University of Hawaii law professor Williamson Chang has said it helped move territorial lawmakers to end the death penalty.¹²
3. 1957Hawaii abolished the death penalty, two years before statehood.¹¹
4. 1995Under Governor Ben Cayetano, Hawaii began sending people from its prisons to private prisons on the mainland, as a temporary answer to crowding.³
5. 2008The U.S. Department of Justice, which had found in 2007 that conditions at the Oahu Community Correctional Center (OCCC) violated the constitutional rights of the people held there, sued the state over mental health care at the jail, and the two sides settled the same day. By 2013 the state met every term except suicide prevention; the court ordered a corrective action plan under a monitor and closed the case in 2015.¹⁴
6. 2010On February 18, Bronson Nunuha, 26, from Pāʻia, Maui, was found dead in his cell at Saguaro, stabbed more than 140 times by other prisoners. His family's lawsuit said a counselor responsible for about 50 men had opened his cell and gone to her office.¹⁵ In June, Clifford Medina, 23, who had a developmental disability, was strangled by his cellmate at Saguaro; his family's lawyers said the cellmate had warned prison officials to separate them.¹⁶ The state and Corrections Corporation of America, which ran Saguaro, settled with Medina's family in December 2014 on terms they kept secret.¹⁷
7. 2015Jonathan Namauleg, 21, from Maui, was found unconscious and face down on the floor of his cell at Saguaro on August 6 and died that afternoon. Eloy police secured the cell as a crime scene.¹⁸
8. 2017In July, Jessica Fortson, 30, hanged herself at the Women's Community Correctional Center in Kailua; the lawsuit her mother later brought says her requests for treatment were ignored.¹⁹ On October 12, Daisy Kasitati, 26, a mother of four, died in her cell at the Maui Community Correctional Center. Hours earlier she had asked a corrections officer to put her on suicide watch, and her cellmates had asked the officer to get her medical help. In the state's own words, "no action was taken to get her medical help or to put her on suicide watch." The state agreed in 2022 to pay her estate $550,000.²⁰
9. 2019Act 234 required the department to report every death in its custody to the governor within 48 hours.⁴ Act 179 created the Hawaii Correctional System Oversight Commission.⁶ Fortson's mother and the mother of a man injured at OCCC filed a federal class action over mental health care in the state's prisons and jails.¹⁹
10. 2020Late in the year, on the advice of the Attorney General's Office, the Department of Public Safety stopped naming the people who died in its custody, citing federal health privacy law.²¹
11. 2021At least 23 people died in Hawaii's prisons and jails, the most in at least a decade. The department attributed six deaths at Halawa Correctional Facility in January and February to COVID-19, and gave a specific cause for only three of the 23. Kanikahekili Cuizon, 38, died at Halawa on July 15; staff told his mother he had choked on his food, and the medical examiner ruled that he died of a dose of synthetic cannabinoid. In October, Civil Beat sued for the names of the people who had died.²²
12. 2022On October 25, Circuit Judge John Tonaki ordered the department to release the names of the people who died in its custody and their autopsy reports.²¹ The oversight commission began describing each death in its monthly reports.⁸
13. 2023Jimuel Gatioan, 49, hanged himself at OCCC on March 28 and died in the hospital on April 4.²³ His wife had warned the prosecutor and his lawyer, and both called the jail to say he was a suicide risk. According to his family's lawsuit, a student intern assessed him through the slot in his cell door in front of two cellmates, he was not put on suicide watch, and one of the two officers assigned to his unit was absent, which delayed help when his cellmates called for it. The state agreed in 2026 to pay his estate $800,000.²⁴²⁵ On April 19, Act 22 required the department to post its death reports on its website.¹ Richard Keokeo Taylor Jr., 51, went into his cell at Saguaro at 4:19 a.m. on October 22; an officer found him dead during a cell check more than 11 hours later.²⁶
14. 2024Anton Myklebust, 46, was beaten and strangled in his cell at Saguaro on May 4.²⁷⁴ Artrina De Lima, 45, hanged herself on May 13 at the Maui Community Correctional Center, where jail staff told her mother she had been alone in a room next to the medical unit, and died on May 19. She was at least the sixth person to die by suicide at the Maui jail in four years.²⁸ Raita Fukusaku, 59, died at Halawa on October 14 after he was beaten and stabbed.²⁷⁴ On October 21, So'oso'o Motu, 36, hanged himself at Saguaro; his brother said he had been placed in disciplinary segregation.²⁹²
15. 2025Eric Scotton, 33, died on February 5 after another man held with him attacked him at OCCC, in a cell built for one or two people that held three, in a unit for people with mental illness. The ACLU of Hawaii called it part of an "ongoing pattern of violence" in the state's facilities.²⁷ Under the settlement of the mental health class action, two outside experts inspected OCCC and Halawa; they found six suicides at Halawa in 14 months, and found that staff had not done the required psychological autopsies for at least two of them.¹⁹ In August the ACLU of Hawaii called for a federal investigation of Saguaro and for the state to end its contract with CoreCivic.³⁰ On December 2, a 45-year-old man died after staff found him unresponsive while he was on suicide watch at OCCC. The oversight commission described at least six of that year's deaths as apparent suicides.⁸
16. 2026In August, Denise Foster, 55, a transgender woman held at Halawa, a men's prison, died after she was attacked in her cell; her brother said the medical examiner's staff told him she had been beaten and strangled. Civil Beat counted her as at least the sixth person killed, or suspected to have been killed, in Hawaii's custody since May 2024.³¹

How far the official numbers can be trusted

Before 2023, the state did not announce deaths in custody as they happened, and the department rarely gives a cause.²²² For the 23 people who died in 2021 it gave a specific cause for three.²² Until late 2020 it gave out the names of people who died when reporters asked, then stopped until a judge ordered it to release them.²¹ In 2017, families received no results of the department's clinical mortality reviews, and the department sent out press releases after homicides but generally not after suicides.³²

The official counts disagree with each other. The oversight commission's annual report for 2025 gives 16 deaths in one place and 18 in another; for 2024 it counted 12, while the department's list names 14 people.⁸⁴ The department's own records released to the UCLA Law Behind Bars Data Project count 19 deaths in 2020 and 21 in 2021, while its web list names 16 and 23 people. For 2016, those records count 16 deaths, while Hawaii reported 9 to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics.³³⁴³⁴ The federal tables count at least 176 people who died in Hawaii's prisons and jails from 2001 through 2019, at least 28 of them by suicide.³⁴

Some people are missing from the official lists. Jimuel Gatioan, who died in the hospital a week after he was found hanging at OCCC, is not on the department's list for 2023, though the commission described his death.²³⁴ Artrina De Lima, who died in the hospital six days after she was found hanging at the Maui jail, is on neither the department's list for 2024 nor the commission's account of that year's deaths.²⁸⁴³⁵ The department lists Denise Foster under her former name, which she had legally changed.⁴³¹