HONOLULU (KHON2) — It is the end of an era at the Hawaii Supreme Court.
Longtime Chief Justice Mark Recktenwald is retiring this week, and there aren’t yet enough qualified applicants interested in taking his place.
Recktenwald turns 70 this week, and that is the mandatory retirement age for Hawaii judges. The judicial selection committee has extended the deadline multiple times for applications for the job.
“It’s been wonderful to be able to take on this opportunity to help the people of Hawaii, try to serve people,” said Recktenwald.
Recktenwald was appointed to the Hawaii Supreme Court in 2009 after two years on the Intermediate Court of Appeals bench. In 2010, he was sworn in as chief justice. He was then-Governor Lingle’s pick.
“Mark is a person of great integrity. He’s going to follow the law, he’s going to look at the facts of a case. He’s not going to let ideology determine how he rules in any situation,” said former Governor Linda Lingle.
Recktenwald is the ripe young age of 70, an age at which many professionals are at the top of their game. But 70 is Hawaii’s mandatory judicial retirement age.
“It’s probably a little bit of a relic of a bygone time when, you know, 70 might be an age when folks might not be suited to be able to have a job like this,” said Recktenwald. “But I think times have changed. So it probably could be maybe 75 would be something that would possibly work.”
“Since I’m 72, I would agree,” Lingle added. “I say, ‘Oh yeah, 70 is very young,’ but this issue has come up before. While I was in office, it came up when Chief Justice Moon had to retire at the age of 70. And at that time, there was a lot of discussion about it.”
Change would take a constitutional amendment. Meanwhile, the applicant pool for his own job is not yet big enough for the judicial selection commission to cull the minimum four to six qualified applicants to put forth to the governor to pick a nominee.
“It’s literally the best job that a lawyer can have in the state of Hawaii. I mean, it is the ability to advance the public good, to be able to provide justice in the courtroom, to be able to have programs that help make the reality of justice more apparent to people,” Recktenwald said.
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Justice Sabrina McKenna will be taking over in the interim as chief justice, and she confirmed to KHON2 that she has applied for a permanent spot.
McKenna is the Supreme Court’s most senior sitting judge and has served on numerous levels of state court benches. The commission is not naming other applicants yet, but will identify the finalists once turned in to the governor.
The retiring chief justice says he looks forward to co-teaching a course with the dean of the William S. Richardson School of Law at UH, named after another past head of the judiciary.
“We have a real commitment to access to justice here. So that’s been a really big part of what we do, trying to make the criminal justice system more effective by meeting the needs of folks who have who are subject to addiction, they’ve been subject to abuse,” Recktenwald said.
Another legacy he leaves — selecting 65 out of about 85 district and family court judges on the bench today. When he started, about 30 percent were women, and women make up more than half of those judges now.
“I’ve tried hard to pick folks who are both from the prosecutor, public defender, public interest, public service, private practice,” Recktenwald said. “So I think we have a really, really strong group of judges. I’m very, very proud of that legacy, and I’m very proud of the team we have here at the judiciary, and I think they’re going to do a great job going forward.”
An extended half-hour of interviews with Chief Justice Recktenwald and Former Gov. Linda Lingle can be viewed on our KHON+ streaming app.