Of the three elected prosecutors preceding Shaylene Iseri-Carvalho, including Craig DeCosta, Michael Soong and Ryan Jimenez (all now in private practice), only Soong would speak on the record when asked about the current state of the county Prosecuting Attorney’s Office.
Of the three elected prosecutors preceding Shaylene Iseri-Carvalho, including Craig DeCosta, Michael Soong and Ryan Jimenez (all now in private practice), only Soong would speak on the record when asked about the current state of the county Prosecuting Attorney’s Office.
“I would say it’s challenging. I thoroughly enjoyed it,” Soong said of his 14 years at the Prosecuting Attorney’s Office.
“There’s always turnover. The Prosecuting Attorney’s Office is a starting place for attorneys to get litigation experience, then move on,” said Soong, who was elected prosecuting attorney from 1996 to 2004, and an appointed deputy prosecuting attorney from 1991 to 1996.
“People come and go,” Soong said. They move, or are asked to leave, he said of two scenarios. “Most of the people parted on good terms,” he said of attorneys who left while he was in office.
Other county prosecutors’ offices have turnover too, but not at the rate Kaua‘i’s has seen this year. Nearly half the staff has left Iseri-Carvalho’s office in the past five months.
The largest prosecutor’s office in the state belongs to the City and County of Honolulu. There are 105 attorneys when fully staffed, 104 now, said Jim Fulton, the office’s executive assistant.
In the 13 years that Peter Carlisle has been the elected prosecutor, he said, the office has averaged a turnover rate of around 15 percent per year, or 12 to 18 attorneys annually.
“There is going to be dramatic turnover,” Fulton said, especially in the first year a new prosecutor is in office. Carlisle bucked that trend, as the number of attorneys who left voluntarily in his first year in office was low, he added.
“It’s a very intense job. There’s never enough resources for the amount of work,” said Jay Kimura, the Big Island prosecuting attorney and the sitting prosecuting attorney with the most years of service in the position in the state.
A majority of the work is litigation, so the attorneys are always in court, he said. “It’s always difficult to retain qualified attorneys,” who leave for personal reasons, promotions and many other reasons, he said.
There are vacancies now in Kimura’s office, he said, partly due to state funds running out. Some 20 percent of salaries in his office, including some of his, come from state funds, he said.
