After about an hour of hearing oral arguments, Circuit Court Judge Karen Ahn has taken the matter under advisement and said she’ll rule by Tuesday.

Nick Grube reports for Inside Honolulu:

At issue is whether pictures from a McDonald’s surveillance video should be released to the public as part of a defense motion claiming federal agent Christopher Deedy has immunity in the shooting death of Kollin Elderts.

Deedy, who works for the U.S. State Department, was in Honolulu for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation conference, when he shot and killed Elderts at a McDonalds in Waikiki on Nov. 5 after a dispute. 

The Honolulu prosecutor’s office wants to keep the defense’s motion secret because it supposedly contained information that could taint a potential jury pool if it were made public. But this week Deedy’s attorney as well as those representing the Honolulu Star-Advertiser, Hawaii News Now and the Hawaii Reporter argued that information should be released.

On Thursday, Portnoy told Ahn that in his 40 years of practice he’d never seen a prosecutor trying to seal records during a proceeding. It’s usually the defense that does this, he said, to protect a client’s right to a fair trial.

“If this gets sealed then it seems to me that anytime a party decides that a pleading filed by an opposing counsel somehow contains something they don’t want out it’s going to get sealed,” Portnoy said. “And I think if you look at the United States Supreme Court, if you look at the supreme courts of almost every state, the circuit courts of all 11 districts, you will find that it takes an extraordinary showing to seal a publicly filed pleading.”

Deputy prosecutor Janice Futa, however, argued that the prosecution has just as much of a right to a fair trial as a defendant, although she conceded it’s not something covered by the Sixth Amendment of the Constitution.

She also more thoroughly outlined her office’s stance on the information contained in Hart’s motion to dismiss the case, saying it was nothing more than a ploy by Hart to sway the court of public opinion in Deedy’s favor.

“If this information gets out in a vacuum, it’s all Mr. Hart’s commentary, it’s all Mr. Hart’s hearsay testimony,” Futa said. “It’s all Mr. Hart’s interpretation of what’s going on and that’s what the public’s going to see and that’s not fair and that taints the (jury) pool and that should not be allowed.”

— Nick Grube

Image: Deedy’s lawyer, Brook Hart, spoke to media outside the courtroom on Thursday.