Judge Samuel Pailthorpe King
Samuel P. King, born in 1916, was the part-Hawaiian son of Pauline Nawahineokalai Evans and politician Samuel Wilder King, who served as Hawaiʻi’s delegate in Congress from 1935 to 1943 and was the governor of the Territory of Hawaiʻi from 1953 to 1957.
Samuel P. King graduated from Punahou School in Honolulu and attended Yale University, where he obtained his bachelor degree in 1937 and his law degree in 1940. He served in the Navy during World War II. Following the war, he was an attorney in private practice and a part-time magistrate in Honolulu until 1961. He served as the chairman of the Republican Party of the Territory of Hawaiʻi from 1953 to 1954. In 1961 Governor William Quinn appointed him to be a judge on the Circuit Court, where he served until 1967, when he became a Family Court judge.
King unsuccessfully ran on the Republican ticket for governor in 1970. In 1972, President Richard Nixon appointed King to be a federal judge in the District of Hawaiʻi. He served as Chief Judge from 1974 to 1984. Although there were two judgeships in the District of Hawaiʻi, King served alone from 1978 to 1981 because the second judgeship remained unfilled. Judge King presided over many high-profile criminal and civil cases. He issued several rulings in cases brought by opponents of the H-3 freeway; presided over the 1985 trial in a notorious murder case on Palmyra Atoll; and in 1979 he upheld the state Land Reform Act that allowed lessees to purchase the land under their homes from the leaseholders. In 1984, he became a senior judge, meaning that he was semi-retired but still heard cases.
In later life, King distinguished himself by writing with four others the essay Broken Trust that ran in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin in 1997. It was an indictment of the Bishop Estate trustees who managed the trust fund established by Princess Bernice Pauahi Bishop to support Kamehameha Schools. King’s father had served as a trustee of Bishop Estate in the 1950s. Samuel P. King died in 2010.