There is nobody in the judiciary who has attended more arraignment and pleas or paid closer attention to the grand jury indictment process than me. I can say so with complete confidence because, as a central part of my trade, it was incumbent upon me to track exactly when cases transferred from the District Court to the Circuit Court due to the severe perils that could ambush my clients: namely, sudden bail increases, bail revocations, and most commonly, the double service of a warrant where bail had already been posted on the District Court level, yet unserved upon Circuit Court indictment.

That last issue is what I want to call out specifically, because The Honorable Judge Ronald Johnson deserves immense credit for solving a 20-plus-year systemic defect. Unfortunately, his innovative solution went almost unanimously unrecognized. Even I had been a direct beneficiary of his solution for years without realizing the intricate legal gymnastics he engineered from chambers to protect the accused in the First Circuit of Hawaiʻi. While blowhards like me—and let’s be real, plenty of outspoken criminal defense attorneys—wrongly focused our complaints on the shortcomings of the transfer process, Judge Johnson quietly engineered a cure so creative that we benefited from its protection without ever seeing the wizard behind the curtain.

The Problem: The 20+ Year Broken Transfer Trap

The twenty-plus-year problem that has plagued the First Circuit is that when a felony case transfers from District Court to Circuit Court upon formal indictment, a bench warrant is automatically generated. It is a complete and utter lost cause trying to explain to the Honolulu Police Department that a bail bond posted in District Court transfers over to Circuit Court, since the accompanying “Order Pertaining to Bail,” or OPB is rarely ever reviewed, recognized, or honored. To HPD, the bench warrant created upon indictment is treated as an active fugitive warrant. They do not understand that the warrant is not for missing court, is not for violating terms or conditions of release, and is not a brand-new crime. It is simply the mechanical, administrative artifact of a case transferring up to Circuit Court to finalize the standard of reaching probable cause via grand jury indictment.

Specifically, HPD does not read the notes section of a new warrant entry where it often explicitly clarifies that the bail bond transfers and that the defendant is to be released if arrested. HPD officers also do not bother looking past Exhibit A, the bench warrant, and review the OPB which is created as a couplet to cases where bail has been posted—which expressly orders that the bail bond transfers from the District Court docket to the new Circuit Court indictment docket. Even in the rare event that a veteran officer with years of experience takes the time to look at an OPB, the fact that the legal language says the bond transfers is completely lost on them. They cannot connect the dots that a bond transfer directly means the defendant shall be released, since bail has already been posted.

I have written about this for years: while the Sheriff’s Division and everyone inside the judiciary understands that a transferring bond honors existing release, HPD cannot make that operational leap. To the police, it remains an unclear judicial command, and merely reading that a bond transfers does not give them the internal authorization to release an arrestee.

Over the years, I have stood in the legal foxhole alongside heavyweight defense attorneys like Michael J. Green, Myles Breiner, Christian Enright, and Victor Bakke on high-bail cases where our clients had already posted tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars of bail. Yet overly ambitious Crime Reduction Unit (CRU) officers routinely monitor indictment returns on Friday afternoons to cherry-pick low-hanging fruit. For an aggressive unit, serving an indictment warrant on someone who already bailed out is an easy stat to pad their arrest metrics. The defendant isn't hiding; their verified residence and phone numbers are often printed right on the face of the warrant documents, since the booking which happened typically days prior is recent, valid, and ready for service.

Because the grand jury sits on Friday, afternoon filings gave these units free rein to hunt compliant defendants over the weekend. For me, as a bail agent, that meant countless Friday nights, Saturdays, and Sundays ruined by emergency drives out to the Kapolei Police Station or remote rural substations to post a second bail bond for a client who had already posted bail and complied with every condition.

In extreme edge cases, this bureaucratic breakdown was literally life-threatening. Picture the justified rage of a local family on the westside who pooled every last dollar of their savings to bail out their loved one, only to have HPD surround their house again three days later on the exact same case. The family thinks it is an unlawful mistake, an outrage, and an ambush—so they dig in having already posted bail. HPD, operating on pure tunnel vision, believes they have an active felony warrant and hold the moral high ground of public safety. I have had clients barricade themselves inside their homes while police shut down entire residential streets, escalating the situation into a full tactical SWAT standoff to execute an indictment warrant for which bail had already been lawfully posted.

Judge Johnson’s Creative Blueprint

Enter Judge Ronald Johnson’s innovative workaround, which flew completely under everyone's radar. It took me years of benefiting from its effects to finally realize what was happening, because it was never broadcast with a press release.

Upon the return of a grand jury indictment or information charging where bail had already been posted, Judge Johnson exercised pure judicial discretion: he allowed the court to decline the issuance of a grand jury arrest warrant.

Instead, an Order Pertaining to Bail was created establishing that the defendant was ordered to appear in Circuit Court on the same timeline as if the grand jury return hearing were, in fact, the booking date. Defendants simply appeared at that A&P date without the court ever issuing an active warrant for police to execute. Then, after their appearance, Judge Johnson would direct defendants to hang around for paperwork so that the Sheriff’s Division at 240 Keawe St. could conduct an “identification processing,” which satisfied the booking requirement of a grand jury warrant—all while brilliantly skipping the search and street arrest process.

This was an absolute operational game changer. For decades, the entire legal community was conditioned to believe there was no alternative: to get a Circuit Court appearance calendared after an indictment, the warrant had to be formally served. You couldn't just call chambers or file a rogue motion to get on the A&P calendar; the defendant had to be physically arrested to trigger the creation of the court date. That archaic bottleneck allowed law enforcement to juke their arrest stats on major felonies, needlessly re-arresting compliant citizens just to jump-start court scheduling.

Judge Johnson’s chambers dismantled that bottleneck. When the defendant voluntarily appeared in court on their scheduled A&P date, Judge Johnson would confirm on the record that the grand jury warrant was officially recalled and order the defendant to report to the Sheriff Booking Facility for simple identification processing. This fulfilled the statutory requirement of executing warrant processing without exposing the accused to a street arrest, handcuffs, or redundant detention.

The Ultimate Mea Culpa

When I first noticed this new dynamic taking place, I tried to explain the mechanics to the attorneys who shared mutual care of these defendants with me. It was nearly impossible to explain to seasoned attorneys how an A&P court date could materialize out of thin air without prior warrant service.

Compounding the confusion, several brilliant and vocal defense attorneys began objecting profusely on the record to the ID processing order. And let's be honest: I was right there on the soapbox with them. I even published a newsletter calling ID processing a scam, arguing that walking into a booking facility, waiting in a holding cell, getting fingerprinted, and being processed met every legal definition of a custodial arrest.

I was completely missing the forest for the trees.

While I was posturing on my procedural high horse, I failed to recognize the binary reality of the situation. We had two practical choices:

• Retain the twenty-year broken status quo, where families watch their loved ones get ambushed at home by CRU officers, dragged to a cell block, and forced to post bail a second time.
• OR support the court’s creative mechanism, which bypassed the bench warrant entirely and offered a dignified self-surrender for purely administrative ID processing.

Double-click into that dynamic for a moment. Would you rather complain about the inconvenience of an hour of ID processing, or have specialized police units cruising active indictment sheets, hunting low-hanging fruit to advance their careers, and kicking down doors of families who bailed out loved ones just days prior?

You will never successfully explain the complex nuances of bail bond transfers to rank-and-file officers or police brass.Even officers who hold law degrees cannot seem to wrap their heads around the fact that an existing bond extinguishes the need for a re-arrest. I spent nearly two decades slamming my head against that bureaucratic brick wall.

So consider this my formal, public revision. What Judge Johnson engineered was pure judicial craftsmanship. He solved a dangerous problem that plagued the First Circuit for decades, and he did it without fanfare. I know it sounds peculiar for a bail agent to have this hyper-specific corner of criminal procedure dialed in better than most, but I’ve been living on the front lines seeing how the sausage is made and understand this process uniquely well. Aside from Judge Johnson's chambers and Criminal Assignments, nobody knows the quirks of this machine better than me.

Giving Judge Johnson His Flowers

As Judge Ronald Johnson has officially left the Arraignment & Plea and Grand Jury calendars—passing the mantle into the exceptionally capable hands of Judge Somerville—I want to offer him an unvarnished tribute from the bottom of my heart:

First, I was wrong. In years past, when bail spiked dramatically from District Court to Circuit Court, I looked for prosecutorial conspiracies and accused the bench of working in lockstep with the State to bankrupt defendants. I was sophomoric. Over hundreds of hearings, I came to realize that judges must evaluate raw facts and genuine public safety concerns when new evidence emerges between an initial arrest and a formal indictment.

Second, thank you for giving me my weekends back. Selfishly, Judge Johnson's procedure saved my sanity. Over recent years, I haven't had to scramble into my car on a Saturday night to post emergency duplicate bonds in rural districts. His fix was so effective that it fundamentally changed my underwriting: I no longer have to turn down low-level Class C felonies out of fear that an inevitable grand jury indictment will trap my clients in custody and force me to write a duplicate bond randomly on a weekend.

Lastly, he deserves the crown for mastering the most demanding calendar in the First Circuit. Presiding over A&P is a relentless grind. Twice every week, year after year, he had to parse through dense Intake Service Center reports, dig out what is often omitted by defense counsel during arguments, withstand high-pressure prosecutorial demands, and cut through the fog of pretrial risk.

The A&P judge is easily the most critical judicial officer affecting real-time public safety on Oʻahu. Do it wrong, and dangerous offenders slip back out to harm the public, while low-risk, presumed-innocent citizens languish behind bars simply because they are poor. Judge Johnson balanced that knife-edge with unmatched stamina and clarity—ordering detention where genuine danger existed, while granting supervised release and bail reductions where appearance was assured.

To execute that exhaustive, detail-driven balancing act on every single felony case in the circuit court at the highest level of judicial acumen was remarkable. He not only deserves his flowers; he set the standard for the modern era of Hawaiʻi’s judiciary.

Here’s to you, Judge Ronald Johnson. Congratulations on your transition to Chief Administrative Judge for the Circuit Court of the First Circuit. Under your continued leadership, our courts are in steady hands. Your legacy on the A&P calendar went largely unnoticed by the masses, but it certainly did not go unnoticed by me.

P.S. Jeez, I know I was such a headache all those years, lobbing fiery critiques from the peanut gallery. You always took the high road, maintained judicial poise, and let the results speak for themselves. That speaks volumes about your character, and you not only deserve flowers, but perhaps even a crown for being the best A&P judge of the modern judicial era.

- Jail Mail Nick