Hawaii Expungement Tool

Posted: April 18, 2025

I had a lot of success with automating the expungement process in Maryland and so I decided to see if I could replicate that success in Hawaii. Many of the same issues for Maryland expungement automation existed in Hawaii. 

1. A cumbersome but relatively objective expungement law. 
2. A court website that holds the case information needed to make that determination.
3. Tedious paperwork that needed to be filled out for each case.

The first step was to map out the expungement law so the program could determine whether a case was eligible or not. The pictures below shows the many possible paths to determine eligibility. The process of mapping out all of the possibilities is one of the best ways to learn the law. 

Step two was to get the case data. The Hawaii case record look up website, called eCourt Kokua, holds the information necessary for determining expungement eligibility. One big difference between Maryland and Hawaii was the Hawaii case record lookup website has a captcha preventing the type of easy web scraping I was able to do in Maryland. To get around this I decided to build a chrome extension so the user could navigate to the case in question and then activate the chrome extension which would pull the relevant information from the case page the user is currently looking at and feed it through the expungement algorithm.

Finally, in Hawaii the expungement form itself is fairly simple and only one is required to apply for expungement for all your cases. However, an interesting element to Hawaii expungement law is you need to send a letter to the court once the expungement has been granted, asking them to remove it from eCourt Kokua. This needs to be done for every case. The program fills out the expungement form but also generates a letter to the court with the relevant case information. Once the client receives the expungement orders they can mail in the letter requesting it be removed from public view.

 

The program was used successfully in two expungement clinics where attorneys from a number of different organizations were able to use the app to generate expungement petitions for more than 100 people. We were also able to automate the process of generating bench warrant recall paperwork which was used at the second clinic. For more information read the press release at https://law.hawaii.edu/24630/. 

This app was built with significant assistance from William S. Richardson Law Student Ben Leider. The app can be downloaded from the chrome webstore at https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/ecourt-kokua-multi-tool/jdkfgncbbgafpaebjeoiledhigcadbak. The app is open source and the code can be found on GitHub at https://github.com/HawaiiLawSchoolTechIncubator/Hawaii-Bench-Warrant-Recall-Chrome-Extension.