The dissidents disagreed. They set out their position that the order should have been considered as a whole and that the court should have considered the other competing orders, which, when considered together, led to the detention of U.S. citizens in concentration camps based primarily solely on their race. The controversial measures faced legal challenges that, despite serious constitutional problems, ultimately did not lead to the release of prisoners from the camps. The District Court`s decision upheld Korematsu`s name, but the Supreme Court`s decision remains in place. Justice Hugo Black wrote for the majority that “all legal restrictions that restrict the civil rights of a single racial group are immediately suspect” and subject to the criteria of “the strictest scrutiny,” not all of these restrictions are inherently unconstitutional. “The urgent need of the public,” he writes, “can sometimes justify the existence of such restrictions; racial antagonism can never do that. The internment of Japanese Americans during World War II sparked a constitutional and political debate. Meanwhile, three Japanese-American citizens challenged the constitutionality of the forced relocation and curfew through a lawsuit: Gordon Hirabayashi, Fred Korematsu and Mitsuye Endo. Hirabayashi and Korematsu received negative verdicts; but Mitsuye Edo was determined to be “loyal” after a long battle in smaller courts and was allowed to leave the establishment in Topaz, Utah. In 1980, Congress established a commission to evaluate the events that led to the issuance of Executive Order 9066 and accompanying military directives, as well as their impact on resident citizens and foreigners, and instructed the commission to recommend corrective measures. This Congressional Committee on the Resettlement and Internment of Civilians at War (CWRIC) discussed the Korematsu decision in its 1982 report, Personal Justice Denied, and concluded that “every part of the decision, issues of factual review and legal principles, has been discredited or abandoned” and that “today, the korematsu decision has been overturned in the court of history.” [20] [21] Korematsu challenged his conviction in 1983 by filing a writ of Coram Nobis with the U.S.
District Court for the Northern District of California, alleging that the original conviction was so flawed that it represented a grave injustice that should be overturned. As evidence, he presented the findings of the CWRIC report, as well as recently discovered internal communications from the Department of Justice showing that evidence contradicting the military necessity of Executive Order 9066 was knowingly concealed from the Supreme Court. In particular, he said Attorney General Charles H. Fahy hid from the court a war note from the Bureau of Naval Intelligence, the Ringle Report, which concluded that very few Japanese posed a risk and that almost everyone who did so was already in detention when the executive order was issued. [22] Although the government did not admit any error, it filed a counter-application in which it asked the court to quash the conviction without making a statement of fact on the merits. Justice Marilyn Hall Patel dismissed the government`s motion and concluded that the Supreme Court had indeed received a selective record that was a compelling circumstance sufficient to overturn the original conviction. It upheld the case, thus overturning Korematsu`s conviction, but stressed that any precedent set by the case remained in force, as this decision was based on a fault on the part of the prosecution and not on an error of law. [23] [24] On February 3, 2014, Judge Antonin Scalia said William S. during a discussion with law students at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Richardson School of Law that “the Supreme Court`s Korematsu decision upholding the internment of Japanese Americans was erroneous, but this could happen again in wartime.” [28] In October 2015, at Santa Clara University, Scalia told law students that Judge Jackson`s dissenting opinion in Korematsu was the court`s previous opinion he admired the most, adding, “It was good to know that at least someone in court realized it was wrong.” [29] In the years that followed, the US internment policy was sharply criticized. In 1988, Congress granted $20,000 in restitution payments to each survivor of the 10 camps.
After a terrorist attack in San Bernardino, California, during the 2016 election campaign, Trump called for a ban on Muslims entering the United States, comparing it to Roosevelt`s executive order, which authorized internment. In a later interview with TIME, he did not want to clearly reject internment camps. The executive order did not specify Japanese Americans as a group, but the U.S. military arrested more than 100,000 people over the next six months and moved them to camps and facilities with armed guards and barbed wire. In 1998, President Clinton awarded Fred Korematsu the Presidential Medal of Freedom, noting that “in our country`s long history of constant pursuit of justice, some names of ordinary citizens represent millions of souls: Plessy, Brown, Parks. To this prestigious list, today we add the name of Fred Korematsu. And in 2011, Neal Katyal, the acting attorney general of the United States, admitted that the Justice Department had misled the Supreme Court in the Korematsu case by finding important facts that undermined the case for internment. The case is today, he said, “like a reminder of the mistakes of that time.” This month is the anniversary of one of the darkest episodes in U.S. history. On February 19, 1942, President Roosevelt ordered the internment of more than 120,000 Japanese Americans in internment camps throughout the country.
Meanwhile, Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson sent a bill to Senator Robert Rice Reynolds and House Speaker Sam Rayburn authorizing the enforcement of Executive Order 9066. On March 21, Congress signed into law the bill that Roosevelt signed. [10] On March 24, 1942, the Western Defense Command began issuing civilian deportation orders, ordering “all persons of Japanese origin, including foreigners and non-foreigners,” to report to certain collection points. With the publication of Civil Restraining Order No. 1 on the 19th. In May 1942, Japanese Americans were forced to move to resettlement camps. [11] Eleanor Roosevelt, who helped draft the Universal Declaration of Human Rights six years later, wrote in her memoirs that she had hoped to change her husband`s mind about internment. However, when she raised the issue, he told her never to talk about it again.
On May 20, 2011, Acting Attorney General Neal Katyal issued an unusual statement denouncing one of his predecessors, Attorney General Charles H. Fahy. [22] He accused Fahy of “suppressing critical evidence” in the Hirabayashi and Korematsu cases before the Supreme Court during World War II, particularly the Ringle Report`s conclusion that there was no evidence that Japanese Americans were acting as spies or sending signals to enemy submarines. The verdicts of the 1980s that overturned korematsu and Hirabayashi`s convictions concluded that the non-disclosure of the Ringle Report, as well as an initial report by General De Witt showing racist motivations behind military orders, was a fatal mistake in prosecuting their cases before the Supreme Court. Katyal noted that Justice Department lawyers had indeed alerted Fahy that failure to disclose the existence of the Ringle report in oral arguments or arguments before the Supreme Court “could be close to suppressing evidence.” Katyal concluded that Fahy “failed to inform the court that a number of important allegations used to justify detention” had been questioned, if not completely discredited, in the government`s own agencies. DISCLAIMER: These resources are prepared by the U.S. Courts Administration Office for educational purposes only. They may not reflect the current state of the law and are not intended to provide legal advice, litigation advice or commentary on ongoing cases or laws.
In Tuesday`s majority opinion upholding President Donald Trump`s travel ban, the Supreme Court also overturned a long-criticized decision that upheld the constitutionality of Japan-U.S. internment during World War II. “First of all, it should be noted that any legal restriction that restricts the civil rights of a single racial group is immediately suspect. This is not to say that all these restrictions are unconstitutional. That is, the courts must subject them to the strictest scrutiny. The urgent need of the public may sometimes justify the existence of such restrictions; racist antagonism can never do that,” Black said. Although the internment order also applied to Italians and Germans in the United States, almost all of the prisoners were Japanese Americans. Roberts added, “The forced relocation of U.S. citizens to concentration camps, solely and explicitly on the basis of race, is objectively illegal and beyond the scope of the president`s authority.” [39]: 38 [40][21] Congress considers Korematsu to be put in a minority by Trump v.
Hawaii. [41] No decent person can consider internment as some kind of “precedent” for acceptable government behaviour. And no passable lawyer considers the Supreme Court`s decision in the Korematsu case to be a good right. In 1983, a pro bono legal team with new evidence opened the 40-year-old case in federal district court on the basis of government misconduct. They showed that the government`s legal team deliberately suppressed or destroyed evidence from government intelligence agencies reporting that Japanese Americans did not pose a military threat to the United States. Official reports, including those of the FBI under J.