A 2022 Honolulu slip-and-fall case will go to the state Supreme Court over claims of “systemic bias” in Hawai‘i's judicial system.
Four years ago, Hye Ja Choi allegedly slipped and fell in a pool of water in the lobby of her condo building. Claiming to have incurred severe physical injuries to her neck, back and arms, she sued the building management company and condo owners’ association.
But on Thursday, the state Supreme Court approved a request to review the case, after Choi accused the state Intermediate Court of Appeals of violating her due process rights.
In her request to the Supreme Court, Choi called the case “a catastrophic breakdown of federal and state constitutional protections,” as she claimed she was not fairly provided support in court as a non-English speaker.
Choi — whose request to the Supreme Court was, she claimed, “translated using a machine” — claimed that a judge, Lisa Cataldo, repeatedly interrupted her during her own oral arguments before dismissing the case. When Choi appealed the dismissal, she found that the official written court transcript reportedly omitted her own statements and included only those of the judge and the defendants.
Choi also claimed that her court-appointed interpreter’s translations in court conflicted with the official record, but when she requested that the Appeals Court review the official transcript, cross-referenced against the official audio recording of the hearing, the court denied that request, and ultimately upheld the circuit court’s dismissal.
In her appeal to the Supreme Court, Choi wrote that she had been “forced into a structural trap”: her income was too high to qualify for free legal aid, but she claimed that the vast majority of Hawai‘i attorneys would refuse consultation requests from non-English speakers.
Because of this, Choi argued that she had been denied equal protection guaranteed by the 14th Amendment of the Constitution.
“A [low-English-proficiency] litigant, who must meticulously translate, review, and draft complex pleadings from a foreign language, requies seven to eight times longer than a native English-speaking attorney to execute identical procedural tasks,” Choi wrote. “Yet, the Hawai‘i judiciary provides no compensatory legal protections or time modifications for language access, transforming standard procedural timetables into an administrative trap engineered to force automatic, non-merit dismissals of minority victims.”
She also claimed that the Appeals Court’s refusal to verify the record violated U.S. Supreme Court mandates requiring states to provide reliable and accurate transcripts to disadvantaged litigants.
Choi urged the Supreme Court to remand her case to a full trial before a newly assigned judge, or else, she warned, the case would establish a precedent signaling that the state “permits a closed network of lower court judges and corporate defense counsel to systematically purge non-English-speaking litigants from the justice system.”
While the Supreme Court on Thursday approved Choi’s request to review the case, the court also ordered that no oral arguments will be heard in the case, although either party can request to still hold oral arguments at an unspecified future date.
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