For all the relieved and smiling faces emerging Friday from U.S. District Court, there was a class of observers who were surely watching the corruption trial of Keith Kaneshiro and Dennis Mitsunaga with alarm.

Wealthy campaign donors.

Now that the not-guilty verdict has come down, though, it will take serious resolve to keep the boundaries of campaign finance laws firmly enforced. And more of that resolve should come from local authorities who, experts point out, have not shown much of that in recent years.

Kaneshiro, Honolulu’s former chief prosecutor, and Mitsunaga, who heads a prominent Hawaii engineering firm , were acquitted Friday on all counts in a federal pay-to-prosecute conspiracy case. So were with four other executives of Mitsunaga and Associates Inc.: Terri Ann Otani, Aaron Shunichi Fujii, Chad Michael McDonald and Sheri Jean Tanaka. All six had entered not guilty pleas.

They had been facing fines and up to 15 years in prison after the two-months-long trial. Despite the verdict, defendants speaking to the media attested to the emotional strain this caused.

That could be one takeaway. Accusations of corruption are serious, the stress is devastating, and this should give pause to those who make political donations.

A conviction in a quid-pro-quo allegation “was always going to be difficult to prove in a court of law,” political analyst Colin Moore told the Honolulu Star-Advertiser. But what the case did show, he said, was the willingness of the federal government to pursue the charges aggressively.

In the June 2022 indictment: The defendants were alleged to have conspired to charge a former Mitsunaga employee with felony theft for exposing the company to liability and keeping some money from jobs done on company time with company resources. They were indicted on federal charges of conspiracy, honest services wire fraud and federal program bribery.

Mitsunaga is a prominent business figure who has given many thousands in campaign contributions to candidates for county, state and federal offices. The focus in this case was some $45,000 in donations to Kaneshiro between October 2012 and October 2016.

Coloring all of this were Kaneshiro’s ties to former Police Chief Louis Kealoha and his ex-wife, former Deputy Prosecutor Katherine Kealoha, both convicted in 2021 in a notorious public corruption case.

Not all observers are sanguine about the message sent by the outcome. Alexander Silvert, a retired federal public defender involved in the Kealoha case, said the acquittal may convince onlookers that getting caught for campaign violations is unlikely.

However, Silvert said, the case could offer a playbook for the same federal prosecutorial team, which will be back in October for a separate trial about city officials’ involved in striking a severance deal for the ex-police chief.

The legal cloud over the Department of the Prosecuting Attorney has hovered there for eight years, expanding beyond that to Honolulu Hale. This ought to be intolerable.

Instead, the corruptive influence of lobbyists’ and donors’ money circulating throughout the political arena have persisted, becoming impossible to ignore, bringing down two former state lawmakers, J. Kalani English and Ty Cullen, in 2021; both pleaded guilty to accepting bribes.

In the immediate aftermath of that case, legislators moved to crack down on corruption, but that effort has not gone nearly far enough.

The acquittals in the Kaneshiro case do not negate the need for careful oversight of money in politics. Perhaps the call should be placed on lawmakers to further strengthen the boundaries of good government for those elected to serve.