Korematsu v. United States
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| Korematsu v. United States | ||||||
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 Supreme Court of the United States of America | ||||||
| Argued October 11, 12, 1944. Decided December 18, 1944. | ||||||
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| Holding | ||||||
| The Japanese American internment was not unconstitutional because the need to protect against espionage outweighed Korematsu's rights. Justice Black argued that compulsory exclusion, though constitutionally suspect, is justified during circumstances of "emergency and peril." | ||||||
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| Case opinions | ||||||
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| Laws applied | ||||||
| Executive Order 9066 |
Korematsu v. United States, 323 U.S. 214 (1944) was a landmark United States Supreme Court case which asked the question, "Did the President and Congress go beyond their war powers by implementing exclusion and restricting the rights of Americans of Japanese descent?"
In a 6-3 decision, the Court sided with the government, ruling that the Japanese American Internment was not unconstitutional. The opinion, written by Supreme Court justice Hugo Black, held that the need to protect against espionage outweighed Korematsu's individual rights, and the rights of Americans of Japanese descent. Justice Black argued that race-based compulsory exclusion, though constitutionally suspect, was justified by the government's assertion of wartime necessity.
The decision in Korematsu v. United States has been one of much controversy. Indeed, Korematsu's conviction for evading internment was overturned on November 10, 1983, after Korematsu challenged the earlier decision by filing for a writ of coram nobis. In a ruling by Judge Marilyn Hall Patel, the Federal District Court for the Northern District of California granted the writ (that is, it voided Korematsu's original conviction) because in Korematsu's original case, the government had knowingly submitted false information to the Supreme Court that had a material impact on the Supreme Court's decision. However, because the coram nobis decision applied only to the factual basis for Korematsu's conviction but not its legal basis, the government arguably still has the power to order mass exclusion and internment like the original Japanese American internment.
The case continues to cause controversy, as an example of government's powers during war and the balance of those powers with individual rights. Similar questions have been asked during the War on Terror, regarding privacy rights and search and seizure issues.
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Introduction
Japanese_American_Internment_Center.jpg
During World War II, western Japanese Americans were forced to move into relocation camps by Presidential Executive Order 9066. This order and congressional statutes gave the military authority to exclude citizens of Japanese ancestry from areas that were deemed critical to national defense and potentially vulnerable from espionage.
A number of significant legal decisions arose out of Japanese American internment, relating to the powers of the government to detain citizens in wartime. Among the cases which reached the Supreme Court were Yasui v. United States (1943), Hirabayashi v. United States (1943), ex parte Endo (1944), as well as Korematsu. In Yashui and Hirabayashi the court upheld the constitutionality of curfews based on Japanese ancestry. In Endo, the court accepted a petition for a writ of habeas corpus and ruled that the WRA had no authority to subject a citizen whose loyalty was acknowledged to its procedures.
Fred Korematsu was a U.S.-born Japanese American man who decided to remain in San Leandro, California and knowingly violate Civilian Exclusion Order No. 34 of the U.S. Army, because he refused to be separated from his non-Japanese girlfriend. He was arrested and convicted. No question was raised as to Korematsu's loyalty to the United States. The Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the conviction, and the Supreme Court granted certiorari.
The question of the case, as noted in Justice Black's opinion, was not whether legal restrictions which curtail the civil liberties of a single racial group are suspect, but rather, whether all such restrictions are constitutional. As the opinion noted, "courts must subject them to the most rigid scrutiny. Pressing public necessity may sometimes justify the existence of such restrictions; racial antagonism never can."
The bench
Opinion
- Written by: Justice Hugo Black
- Joined by: Chief Justice Harlan Fiske Stone and Justices Stanley Reed, William O. Douglas, Wiley B. Rutledge and Felix Frankfurter
Concurring opinion
- Written by: Justice Frankfurter
Dissenting
- Written by: Justice Owen J. Roberts
- Written by: Justice Frank Murphy
- Written by: Justice Robert H. Jackson
The case
The question of the case, as noted in Justice Black's opinion, was not whether legal restrictions which curtail the civil liberties of a single racial group are suspect, but rather, whether all such restrictions are constitutional. As the opinion noted, "courts must subject them to the most rigid scrutiny. Pressing public necessity may sometimes justify the existence of such restrictions; racial antagonism never can."
Justice Black's arguments also relied heavily on the Court's findings in Kiyoshi Hirabayashi v. United States, 20 U.S. 81 (http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/cgi-bin/getcase.pl?court=us&vol=320&invol=813). In Hirabayashi, the Court sustained a conviction obtained for violation of a curfew order for Japanese Americans designed as a 'protection against espionage and against sabotage.' The Court upheld the exclusion order on the same provided justification, and rejected the petitioner's arguments that the threat presented in Hirabayashi no longer existed, that the exclusion order was beyond the war powers of the Congress, or that to apply the curfew order against none but citizens of Japanese ancestry amounted to a constitutionally prohibited discrimination solely on account of race.
The Court rejected that the exclusion order was issued on account of racial antagonism by providing a military justification:
- Like curfew, exclusion of those of Japanese origin was deemed necessary because of the presence of an unascertained number of disloyal members of the group, most of whom we have no doubt were loyal to this country. It was because we could not reject the finding of the military authorities that it was impossible to bring about an immediate segregation of the disloyal from the loyal that we sustained the validity of the curfew order as applying to the whole group. In the instant case, temporary exclusion of the entire group was rested by the military on the same ground.
While justifying the Japanese American internment, however, Justice Black's opinion also noted the hardship caused by the internment, but justified the hardship by relating it to every citizen's burden during war:
- In doing so, we are not unmindful of the hardships imposed by it upon a large group of American citizens. But hardships are part of war, and war is an aggregation of hardships. All citizens alike, both in and out of uniform, feel the impact of war in greater or lesser measure. Citizenship has its responsibilities as well as its privileges, and in time of war the burden is always heavier. Compulsory exclusion of large groups of citizens from their homes, except under circumstances of direst emergency and peril, is inconsistent with our basic governmental institutions. But when under conditions of modern warfare our shores are threatened by hostile forces, the power to protect must be commensurate with the threatened danger.
Justice Black concluded that while racism, discrimination on the basis of racial antagonism, and "imprisonment of a loyal citizen in a concentration camp because of racial prejudice" were impermissible, approaching the case as such an example without examining the military dangers involved would merely "confuse the issue." Closing, Justice Black noted that "There was evidence of disloyalty on the part of some, the military authorities considered that the need for action was great, and time was short. We cannot — by availing ourselves of the calm perspective of hindsight — now say that at that time these actions were unjustified."
Justice Frankfurter filed a concurring opinion, broadly interpreting Congress's war powers as well as finding that the Judiciary had no say in the matter, concluding his opinion with, "That is their business, not ours."
Justice Roberts filed a dissenting opinion, arguing that the Court had erred by considering only the question of exclusion and not looking at the program of exclusion and forced internment as whole. He argued that the program, taken as a whole, was clearly unconstitutional.
Justice Murphy filed a dissenting opinion castigating the majority opinion as a "legalization of racism." After sharply criticizing the racial basis for the internment program, he concluded, "All residents of this nation are kin in some way by blood or culture to a foreign land. Yet they are primarily and necessarily a part of the new and distinct civilization of the United States. They must accordingly be treated at all times as the heirs of the American experiment and as entitled to all the rights and freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution."
Justice Jackson filed a dissenting opinion arguing that the exclusion and internment program was unconstitutional, and that the Court's approval of the program struck a "far more subtle blow to liberty" that would long outlast the emergency at hand: "A military order, however unconstitutional, is not apt to last longer than the military emergency ... But once a judicial opinion rationalizes such an order to show that it conforms to the Constitution, or rather rationalizes the Constitution to show that the Constitution sanctions such an order, the Court for all time has validated the principle." He warned that the dangerous principle "then lies about like a loaded weapon ready for the hand of any authority that can bring forward a plausible claim of an urgent need."
Subsequent History
The internment as well as the Korematsu decision is widely condemned today, often attacked as racist. Proponents and opponents of curtailing civil liberties both cite it as a precedent for large-scale violations of civil liberties and government war-time powers, either as justification or as a warning sign of what might happen again.
Former Supreme Court Justice Tom C. Clark, who represented the US Department of Justice in the "relocation," writes in the Epilogue to the book Executive Order 9066: The Internment of 110,000 Japanese Americans (written by Maisie and Richard Conrat):
- The truth is—as this deplorable experience proves—that constitutions and laws are not sufficient of themselves...Despite the unequivocal language of the Constitution of the United States that the writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended, and despite the Fifth Amendment's command that no person shall be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law, both of these constitutional safeguards were denied by military action under Executive Order 9066....
As earlier stated, Korematsu challenged the earlier decision in 1983, and his conviction was overturned, though the larger issue of internment was not addressed [1] (http://www.asianreporter.com/stories/polo/2005/p-16-05.htm). The U.S. Government officially apologized for the internment in the 1980s and paid reparations totaling $1.2 billion dollars, as well as an additional $400 million in benefits signed into law by George H. W. Bush in 1992. In January of 1998, President Bill Clinton named Fred Korematsu a winner of the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In 2004, Korematsu filed a friend-of-the-court brief in the case of Rasul v. Bush, in which Guantanamo detainees challenged their detention as enemy combatants by the Bush administration. In the brief, Korematsu argued, "The extreme nature of the government’s position in these cases is reminiscent of its positions in past episodes, in which the United States too quickly sacrificed civil liberties in the rush to accommodate overbroad claims of military necessity."
In March of 2005, Korematsu died at the age of 86.
See also
External links
- Full text of the decision courtesy of Findlaw.com (http://laws.findlaw.com/us/323/214.html)