An O‘ahu man accused of imprisoning a woman in her own apartment will get a retrial after he claimed he did it to prevent her suicide.
In 2022, Deno Bell was arrested and charged following a domestic assault incident in Chinatown. While he was charged with kidnapping and strangulation, a jury found him guilty the following year only of second-degree unlawful imprisonment, a misdemeanor offense.
But even that charge may not stick. The Hawai‘i Intermediate Court of Appeals found last week that the jury had been improperly briefed on the facts of the case and will require another trial to determine whether Bell is guilty of unlawful imprisonment.
The case appeared straightforward at first: on March 11, 2022, Bell was in the Chinatown apartment of his neighbor, a woman. Following an evening of drinking, the two got into an argument, Bell became physical; when the woman attempted to flee the apartment, Bell restrained her and prevented her from leaving.
But the accounts of the incident by Bell and the woman lent the story wildly differing characters. The testimony of the woman claimed both parties had been doing cocaine that evening, and that Bell eventually began asking “weird questions,” referring to the woman in third person, asking her to “bring her back” and repeatedly punching her.
At one point, the woman claimed, she had been able to flee her apartment on the eighth floor, descended to the parking garage and met with a security guard, only for Bell to appear and grab her by the throat when the guard stepped away, eventually leading her to his own apartment, where she stayed the night.
Bell, on the other hand, testified that the woman had, one day before, showed bloody cuts down her arm and said she would jump off her apartment lānai, before attempting to do so until Bell held her down.
On the night of the incident, Bell testified that the woman looked “out of her mind” and that he was worried she would jump off her lānai. He denied ever striking the woman but admitted to pulling her back into her apartment once.
At trial, Bell’s defense hinged on a Hawai‘i statute justifying the use of force against another person in order to prevent the commission of a crime or to prevent suicide. He employed a “choice of evils defense,” a legal argument that justifies the use of force so long as it is necessary to avoid imminent harm.
Nonetheless, the jury found Bell guilty of unlawful imprisonment. In an appeal, Bell argued that the court had improperly briefed the jury: the court, he said, should have told the jury that the state bore the burden of proving beyond a reasonable doubt that Bell’s actions were not justified.
The state appeals court evidently agreed. In a verdict published last week, Chief Judge Karen Nakasone vacated the court’s 2023 verdict, requiring a second trial, for which no date has yet been set. However, that trial will only be on the unlawful imprisonment charge; the jury’s finding of not guilty on the other charges of kidnapping and domestic abuse will stand.
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