Kinney attended
Royal School and later
Punahou School 1874–1877 and worked as a clerk in a law office. He graduated from law school at the
University of Michigan in 1883. He married Alice Vaughan McBryde on August 16, 1893 in Honolulu. His first law partner was
Arthur P. Peterson. In 1887 he became partners with
William Owen Smith and
Lorrin A. Thurston. In 1887 he was elected to the
legislature of the Hawaiian Kingdom as a representative from
Hawaii island. During the summer of 1887, he helped draft the
1887 Constitution of the Kingdom of Hawaii, called the "Bayonet Constitution" because King
Kalākaua was forced to sign it. The government headed by
Walter M. Gibson was forced to resign and was replaced by one including Thurston in the cabinet. throne room; Kinney seated at far right He moved to
Salt Lake City, Utah, about 1891 and practiced law there. After the 1893
overthrow of the Kingdom of Hawaii, he was met by some of his former partners, including Thurston, as they visited the
United States to lobby for annexation in February. After
Queen Liliuokalani was arrested in January 1895 following the failed
1895 rebellion against the
Republic of Hawaii, Kinney was selected as
Judge Advocate (with honorary rank of Captain) to prosecute her in a military trial in her former throne room at
Iolani Palace. She was convicted of
misprision of treason. On March 7 he traveled to
San Francisco to press charges against the people accused of shipping arms to the rebels. On May 5, 1897, he was selected for another commission to lobby for annexation to the United States. He traveled to
Washington, DC, and in reply to the Queen's protest was quoted with a comment that might sound racist by modern standards regarding native Hawaiians and Chinese and Japanese interests:Their future is one of two things, to pass under Asiatic or Anglo-Saxon control. If Asiatics dominate, the native must become a coolie, for certainly he cannot expect to be better off than the rank and file of the dominant race....It is a choice between the status of a white American laborer and that of an Asiatic coolie laborer. The white race, if Asiatics absorb Hawaii, can get out to their own country. This time US Secretary of State
John Sherman signed a treaty with Kinney, Thurston, and
New Hampshire lawyer Francis March Hatch on June 16, 1897. The Treaty of Annexation was unanimously adopted by the Senate of the Republic of Hawaii on September 9, 1897. The U.S. Senate passed it by vote of 42–21, the U.S. House of Representatives passed it by vote of 209–91, and President William McKinley signed it on July 7, 1898. On his return, he heard that physician Jared Knapp Smith, brother of his former law partner who was then attorney general, had been killed on September 24, 1897. It was suspected to be in retaliation for ordering patients suspected of
leprosy to exile in
Kalaupapa, which had ignited the
Leper War on Kaua'i four years earlier. Kinney sailed to
Kauai island and was appointed special prosecutor. A native Hawaiian suspect Kapea was arrested, tried on November 13, 1897, found guilty of first degree murder, and hanged on April 11, 1898. In August 1900 he sued a newspaper editor for
libel. In May 1901 he was sentenced to prison for contempt of court, but pardoned by
Sanford B. Dole. His partnership was then called "Kinney, McClanahan & Cooper", including
Henry Ernest Cooper who had chaired the
Committee of Safety in 1893 and E. B. McClanahan. At least one of their cases, "Territory of Hawaii vs. Cotton Brothers & Company" of 1904 went to the
United States Supreme Court. By 1906 the firm replaced Cooper with S. H. Derby. In June 1909 he represented the
Hawaiian Sugar Planters' Association in a conflict during a strike by Japanese workers. Despite his role in her trial, in November 1909 Kinney served as an attorney for deposed Queen Liliuokalani in a
United States Court of Claims case "Liliuokalani v. The United States". His partners are listed as Sidney Miller Ballou and Anderson. The case claimed that the Queen was due compensation for the taking of the
crown lands of the kingdom. In the decision known as 45 Ct. Cl. 418 (1910), the case was dismissed on May 16, 1910. The issue continues to be controversial, known as the
ceded lands issue. Kinney's grand-niece Rubellite Kawena Kinney Johnson filed a similar case 80 years later which was also dismissed on appeal. Kinney grew disenchanted with the territorial government. Instead of the labor reform he had hoped for, he considered the sugarcane plantation owners, known as the "
Big Five", an
oligopoly which continued to exploit cheap workers. By 1912 he joined with congressional delegate
Jonah Kūhiō Kalanianaole in public opposition to appointed
Territorial Governor Walter F. Frear. Kūhiō was the only territorial-wide elected official, although with no direct power. Earlier a firmly conservative Republican, Although the local party supported
Lincoln Loy McCandless, it was not until November 1913 that Wilson appointed
Lucius E. Pinkham. Pinkham had not lived in Hawaii and but had represented plantation owners and other industrialists earlier. By the end of 1913 he was living in
California, where he filed suit against
Alexander & Baldwin, one of the Big Five who were agents for his in-laws' McBryde sugarcane plantation. In 1928 Kinney sued Utah Senator
Reed Smoot and
Mormon leader
Heber J. Grant, accusing them of trying to prevent his book from being published. He died sometime after 1930 in California. ==References==