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