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Samuel P. King, Judge and Critic of Hawaiian Charity, Dies at 94
By DOUGLAS MARTIN
Published: December 11, 2010

Samuel P. King, a federal judge who mobilized the power of the pen to topple overseers of one of the nation’s wealthiest charities, a 19th-century trust set up by Hawaiian royalty to educate the kingdom’s natives, died Tuesday in Honolulu. He was 94.

The cause was complications of a fall the day before, his daughter Charlotte King Stretch said.

Judge King was one of five co-authors of a scathing 6,400-word critique of one of Hawaii’s most powerful institutions, the Bishop Estate, in 1997. Established in the will of a Hawaiian princess who died in 1884, the estate ran schools to educate native Hawaiian youths. Its assets of $10 billion made it the wealthiest charity in the United States in 1995, according to The Wall Street Journal.

The essay, which filled three pages of The Honolulu Star-Bulletin, accused the trustees of, among other things, paying themselves more than $800,000 a year each, conducting financial transactions for personal gain and neglecting the trust’s educational mission.

Two days later, the state attorney general began the first of several investigations. After the Internal Revenue Service threatened to strip the trust of its tax-exempt status retroactively in 1999, the five trustees, all Democratic appointees, resigned or were removed from office.

“They treated it like a cookie jar,” Judge King, a Republican, said of the trustees in an interview with The New York Times in 2000, “or a Democratic pension fund.”

In a 2008 interview with PBS Hawaii, Judge King told of being approached by Randall Roth, a professor of trust law at the University of Hawaii, who showed him a draft of an essay, which the judge called “good stuff.”

But Judge King volunteered that it would carry more weight if prominent people in the community also added their imprimaturs. Judge King agreed to sign on and recommended three others: a former state appeals court judge, a former chairwoman of the University of Hawaii board of regents and a Catholic priest.

Together they formulated a final essay with what The American Journalism Review in 2001 called “damning detail.” Mr. Roth has said Judge King was the “intellectual leader” of the process.

Samuel Pailthorpe King was born on April 13, 1916, in Hankow, China, the son of a commander of a United States Navy gunboat on the Yangtze River. The boy grew up amid banana and macadamia nut groves in Hawaii.

He graduated from Yale and its law school and was a Japanese translator for the Navy in World War II. After his discharge, he went into private practice and then held a succession of territorial and state judgeships. President Richard M. Nixon appointed him to the federal bench in 1972. He assumed senior status in 1984.

Judge King spent 38 years on the federal bench and several times ran unsuccessfully for political office, including Hawaii’s governorship. His thousands of rulings included one protecting the rights of mental patients and another asserting that the F.B.I.’s spying on a defendant by telescope from a quarter-mile away violated his constitutional rights.

His favorite and longest-running case involved protecting a small finch-billed bird, the palila, by removing wild goats and sheep from the slopes of a volcano. He ruled in 1979 that the bird had standing to sue in federal court and monitored the bird’s welfare for the rest of his life.

Besides Ms. Stretch, Judge King is survived by his wife of 66 years, the former Anne Van Patten Grilk; a son, Samuel Jr.; another daughter, Louise King Lanzilotti; and six grandchildren.

Many Hawaiians remembered the judge for an off-the-cuff — and often-quoted — remark to a potential juror who claimed that she had to leave for the island of Maui the next day. “Here today, gone to Maui,” he said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/12/us/12king.html?_r=0