Employee's retaliatory prosecution suit still alive despite bribery acquittals

Federal prosecutors couldn't make criminal bribery charges stick for a former Honolulu prosecutor and engineering firm executives, but civil versions of the claims may live to see another trial.

by Jeremy Yurow, Court House News, January 27, 2026

HONOLULU (CN) — More than a decade after Laurel Mau was arrested on felony theft charges, a federal judge ruled that her lawsuit accusing Honolulu officials and private actors of retaliatory prosecution can move forward.

U.S. District Judge Gonzalo Curiel on Tuesday issued a split decision allowing key portions of Mau’s conspiracy claims to proceed against Honolulu’s former prosecuting attorney and executives at the engineering firm where she once worked. The ruling comes nearly two years after a federal jury acquitted those same defendants of bribery charges in a separate criminal trial.

Mau claims there was a coordinated effort to punish her for suing her former employer, Mitsunaga & Associates, involving campaign donations to then-Prosecuting Attorney Keith Kaneshiro, who brought the now-dismissed criminal charges against her.

Curiel denied motions to dismiss conspiracy claims against the firm’s owner, Dennis Mitsunaga, and its attorney, Sheri Jean Tanaka, in their individual capacities but dismissed claims against Mitsunaga & Associates as a corporate entity. He gave Mau leave to amend her complaint.

“Tanaka engaged in more than mere consultation and information sharing but she was a primary instigator and primary provider of facts and evidence to support Mau’s state prosecution. Through these actions, Tanaka allegedly fabricated a false narrative to maliciously prosecute Mau,” Curiel said.

In August 2012, Mau filed a discrimination lawsuit against Mitsunaga & Associates, where she worked as an architect for 15 years before being fired in November 2011. She says two months later, Mitsunaga and Tanaka met with Kaneshiro — and then began making campaign contributions to Kaneshiro three weeks after that meeting, marking the first of more than $45,000 in donations over four years from a group with no prior history of supporting his campaigns.

In December 2014, Mau was arrested on four counts of second-degree theft tied to purported unauthorized side work during her employment.

The criminal case unraveled quickly. Court records show two deputy prosecutors initially declined to file charges, and senior fraud prosecutor Dwight Nadamoto submitted a 14-page report in June 2014 concluding no crime had occurred. Mau says Kaneshiro nonetheless pushed the case forward.

In his ruling, Curiel declined to grant qualified immunity to Deputy Prosecuting Attorney Jacob George Delaplane and investigator Vernon Branco, whom Kaneshiro assigned to the case, for their investigative conduct.

“Because Deputy Prosecutor Delaplane and Investigator Branco have not established that the Fourth Amendment right was not clearly established at the time of the challenged conduct,” Curiel wrote.

He also refused to strike claims raised by Mau that Tanaka coached a witness, former Honolulu police officer Rudy Alivado, a friend of Mitsunaga’s, to provide false testimony. Curiel said those assertions, which Mau based in part on evidence introduced during the federal criminal trial, were sufficiently connected to the case to remain in the complaint.

“Because Tanaka has not shown that there is no logical connection to the Alivado coaching allegations, that she would be prejudiced, or that the assertions are demonstrably false,” Curiel said.

In 2017, a state court judge dismissed all charges for lack of probable cause, finding that Mitsunaga’s team had driven much of the investigation.

That dismissal later prompted a federal probe that led to a 2022 indictment charging Kaneshiro, Mitsunaga, Tanaka and three other Mitsunaga & Associates employees with bribery and conspiracy. After a two-month trial in 2024, a jury acquitted all defendants following roughly a day and a half of deliberations.

While the criminal trial required proof beyond a reasonable doubt that Kaneshiro accepted bribes in exchange for prosecuting Mau, her civil case asks whether the same conduct, campaign contributions, private meetings and prosecutorial decisions that may be legal individually, combined to violate Mau’s constitutional rights through conspiracy.

“The federal prosecutors had to prove their case, each element of their case, beyond a reasonable doubt,” Mau’s attorney, Carl Osaki, said after an October hearing. “If we had what the federal prosecutors had, I think the civil trial would have been a lot different. It revealed a lot of facts that were previously unknown.”

Mau’s lawsuit has survived multiple dismissal attempts, including statute of limitations challenges. In October, Curiel ruled Mau could not reasonably have uncovered the claimed conspiracy until the 2022 federal indictment publicly exposed links between Kaneshiro’s office and the engineering firm that had remained hidden during discovery in her employment case.

Neither Mau, Kaneshiro nor representatives for the city and county of Honolulu immediately responded to requests for comment.