A man who pleaded guilty to stealing funerary objects from a South Kohala burial cave and selling them at a profit in June 2004 was sentenced in U.S. District Court Wednesday to a maximum of one year in prison.

John Carta, 45, will also need to spend a year under supervised release after his incarceration, according to the sentence by U.S. Magistrate Judge Barry M. Kurren. The charge comes under the federal Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act designed to protect burial sites.

U.S. Attorney Ed Kubo, in a news release, said Carta could have received up to five years if this were a second offense.

The burial items are known as the J.S. Emerson Collection and included wooden bowls, a gourd, a holua sled runner, a spear, kapa and cordage. Federal authorities said 157 items were recovered in all.

Believed to have first been taken from Kanupa Cave in the late 1800s and sold to museums, they were reburied in 2003 by the group Hui Malama I Na Kupuna 'O Hawai'i Nei, a Native Hawaiian group dedicated to the repatriation of Hawaiian burial remains and the objects that accompany them.

A second defendant, Daniel W. Taylor, pleaded guilty and is scheduled to be sentenced May 15.

Court documents said Taylor admitted to trying to sell three items, including a palaoa, or whale-tooth pendant, for $40,000 the day after the break-in. The two were apparently acting on the orders of a third person, M.F., who has never been identified.

Kubo had previously stated that it will be up to the Native Hawaiian community to determine what should be done with the recovered items. Hui Malama is one of four groups that had filed as claimant under NAGPRA rules.

Edward Halealoha Ayau, Hui Malama executive director, praised the Office of the Inspector General for taking the lead in the case. "I believe there were others involved in this case," he said, adding that he wants the agency to continue investigating the Kanupa case as well as similar thefts. "Somebody else is out there monitoring the Federal Register, watching for the repatriation of objects because those are reported in the Federal Register."

Ayau also repeated his criticism of the state attorney general's office for failing to prosecute the case. He said that for the federal crime to have occurred, the two men also had to have been trespassing, breaking and entering, disturbing a historical site, disturbing a burial site, and theft, all of which can be brought as civil charges against the two men.

Attorney General Mark Bennett, reached Thursday night, said he could not comment on the situation other than to say that "we are still actively looking at the case."

Reach Gordon Y.K. Pang at gpang@honoluluadvertiser.com.