The case involves Alden Bunag, a former substitute teacher at a middle school who sexually assaulted a thirteen-year-old student, identified by the pseudonym Luke, on multiple occasions in a classroom between August 2016 and September 2017. Bunag recorded at least two of the assaults and shared at least one video with adults via an online chatroom. FBI agents later found child pornography on his phone and evidence of further distribution. Luke reported that the abuse severely affected his mental health and that he attempted to take his own life. In January 2024, a federal court sentenced Bunag to seventeen-and-a-half years for production of child pornography. On the state side, Bunag pleaded guilty in March 2024 to continuous sexual assault of a minor, promoting child abuse in the second degree, and promoting child abuse in the third degree.
At the July 10, 2024 state sentencing hearing, the circuit court ordered the twenty-year term on count 1 and the ten-year term on count 3 to run consecutively, for a total of thirty years, while running the five-year term on count 4 concurrently. The court's on-the-record rationale focused on the teacher-student relationship and the emotional harm to Luke, then deferred to the prosecutor — telling Bunag the sentence was imposed based on the statutory factors as stated by the prosecutor on the record. The court never mentioned that Bunag had recorded and disseminated videos of the assaults, did not address Bunag's history and characteristics beyond his role as teacher, and did not discuss deterrence, public safety, rehabilitation, or sentencing disparity.
After Bunag filed his notice of appeal on August 8, 2024, the circuit court issued a written order four days later granting the State's oral motion for consecutive sentencing. The State drafted the order; the court adopted it verbatim. That order addressed the videos, the dissemination, Bunag's background, and the full range of statutory factors — ground the court had not covered at the sentencing hearing. The Intermediate Court of Appeals affirmed, relying extensively on that post-sentencing, post-appeal order.
The Hawaii Supreme Court reversed. The court held that post-sentencing written findings cannot salvage an inadequate courtroom explanation, reaffirming the on-the-record-at-the-time-of-sentencing requirement established in State v. Hussein and carried through State v. Kong, State v. Barrios, and State v. Bautista. Allowing a written order to backfill the rationale, the court reasoned, would render the on-the-record requirement meaningless — and the problem is compounded when the order is drafted by the prosecution and adopted verbatim after the defendant has already appealed.
The court also held that the circuit court's oral reasoning was independently deficient. Reciting the nature and circumstances of the offense explains why a defendant deserves a lengthy sentence, not why a consecutive term is necessary on top of the concurrent presumption. The court further held that deferring to the prosecutor's argument — rather than independently articulating its own conclusions — does not satisfy the requirement that consecutive sentencing reasoning be deliberate, rational, and fair. The court vacated the ICA's judgment and the circuit court's judgment of conviction and sentence to the extent it ordered consecutive sentencing, and remanded for resentencing.