Korematsu v. United States (1944)

323 U.S. 214, 65 S. Ct. 193

Facts:

In February 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066 which authorized the curfews, evacuations, and relocation camps of American citizens and permanent aliens of Japanese descent. Toyosaburo (Fred) Korematsu, an American citizen born and raised in Oakland, California with grandparents from Japan, refused to adhere to the evacuation of his region on the west coast. In a district court, he was convicted of violating the exclusion order. He petitioned to the Supreme Court for a review of his case after a court of appeals held the conviction he received at the district court.

Legal Questions:

Do Congress and the Executive have the power to remove Japanese Americans from the west coast solely based on race?

Holding of the Court:

6-3 in favor of the government (defendant)

Legal Reasoning:

Under Exclusion Order #34, Korematsu legally had to leave. Although normally such an order would be a violation of discrimination, it was considered necessary for such a time. It was difficult to know who remained loyal to the Japanese Empire, and therefore the “whole” had to comply for the safety of the public. The Court claimed that war is a time of hardship, and therefore some must sacrifice for the security of the whole nation. Using its constitutionally delegated war powers, the government could decide what those conditions were.

Dissent:

The order is actually not in the interest of a citizen’s safety, but rather a punishment based on ancestry rather than evidence of disloyalty (Justice Roberts).

The order shows obvious discrimination that deprives the right to live and work where the citizens wish to do so (Justice Murphy).

His crime was being present in his home and having an ancestry that he could not control. This is not actually a crime but was made a crime by a series of military orders, which were based on assumptions. The only option out of this crime was to give himself up to a detention camp (Justice Jackson).

This case was largely controversial among civil libertarians at the time and historians remain horrified. Although the war time powers allow severe decisions critical for national security to be made quickly, the Executive overstepped its jurisdiction by condemning 120,000 innocent people to massive life changes and oppression based on race alone. The Thirteenth Amendment claims “slavery and involuntary servitude” shall not exist in the United States unless a crime has been committed (and there was no evidence to support that every single Japanese American had committed a crime against the United States). Also, the Fourteenth Amendment states that no citizen shall be “deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law” (a fair trial).

The dissent is particularly interesting because they foreshadowed what would be brought to the table in 1983 when Korematsu proposed a writ of error coram nobis. Coram nobis allows a petitioner (in this case, Korematsu) to challenge his/her conviction after their sentence has been completed. The goals of this trial were to: overturn Korematsu’s conviction, vacate (or make legally void) the precedent of the Court that was made and used to enforce mass incarceration of Japanese Americans, correct public historical records and perception of the issue to reveal the facts of the exclusion and detention, and to vindicate the three men who were convicted during the “Wartime Cases”.

During the trial, attorneys Peter Irons and Aiko Yoshinaga-Herzig supplied evidence that the Department of Justice and War Department had “suppressed, altered, and destroyed” evidence during the 1944 trial in order to ensure a government victory. This evidence revealed: the covering up of intelligence reports proving loyalty by government prosecutors, the destruction of a General’s Final Report and its altered replacement, and that government attorneys had failed to inform the Supreme Court that allegations of espionage and sabotage by Japanese Americans were false yet used. The writ of coram nobis was granted and Korematsu’s conviction was cleared.

In 1988, the Civil Liberties Act was passed as an apology for the actions carried out without any evidence and motivated by “racial prejudice, wartime hysteria, and a failure of political leadership”. The Act proposed: to acknowledge the injustice of evacuation, relocation, and internment of Japanese Americans during WWII, to apologize on behalf of Americans, to provide funding for public education to inform about the injustice committed in attempt to prevent a repeat of events, to make restitution to those who were wrongfully involved, and to make future concerns of human rights violations in other nations more credible and sincere.

"Civil Liberties Act of 1988." Children of the Camps, PBS, 1999. Accessed 13 Feb.

2017.

Konkoly, Toni. "Korematsu v. United States (1944)." The Supreme Court, PBS, Dec.

2006. Accessed 13 Feb. 2017.

O’Brien, David M.Constitutional Law and Politics: Struggles for Power and

Governmental Accountability. 9th Ed., W.W. Norton & Company, 2014.

Susan Kiyomi Serrano and Dale Minami, Korematsu v. United States: A Constant

Caution in a Time of Crisis, 10 Asian Am. L.J. 37 (2003).

http://landmarkcases.org/en/landmark/cases/korematsu_v_united_states (image)