Supreme Court's Controversial Ruling On Japanese Internment

The Supreme Court's decision to uphold the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II remains one of its most controversial rulings. In the 1944 case of Korematsu v. United States, the Court ruled that the government had the authority to arrest and intern citizens of Japanese descent under Executive Order 9066, issued by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in response to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. This decision has faced widespread criticism and has been described as an odious and discredited artifact of popular bigotry. The Court's endorsement of racial discrimination during wartime raised serious concerns about constitutional rights and civil liberties, with some arguing that it set a dangerous precedent. While the ruling was rebuked and officially overturned in 2018, it continues to be a significant event in American history, highlighting the complex interplay between national security, racial tensions, and individual freedoms.

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The Supreme Court ruled that the evacuation order violated by Fred Korematsu was valid

In 1944, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled in Korematsu v. United States that the evacuation order violated by Fred Korematsu was valid. This decision has since been rebuked and criticised, and was only finally overturned in 2018.

Korematsu, a 23-year-old American citizen of Japanese descent, refused to report to an internment camp and went into hiding in Northern California. He was arrested and convicted of violating the president's order, and appealed on the basis that internment based on race was unconstitutional. The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that his detention was a "military necessity" and not based on race.

Justice Hugo Black wrote that "all legal restrictions which curtail the civil rights of a single racial group are immediately suspect" and subject to tests of "the most rigid scrutiny", but that "pressing public necessity may sometimes justify the existence of such restrictions; racial antagonism never can". The Court's decision was based on the belief that the military's evacuation order was justified by the "martial necessity arising from the danger of espionage and sabotage".

Justice Robert Jackson dissented, arguing that Korematsu "has been convicted of an act not commonly thought a crime. It consists merely of being present in the state whereof he is a citizen, near the place where he was born, and where all his life he has lived". He contended that the nation's wartime security concerns were not adequate to strip Korematsu and other internees of their constitutionally protected civil rights.

In subsequent years, the American internment policy has been met with harsh criticism. In 1983, a pro bono legal team presented new evidence that the government had intentionally suppressed or destroyed evidence from intelligence agencies reporting that Japanese Americans posed no military threat. A federal judge overturned Korematsu's conviction, but the Supreme Court decision remained as a discredited precedent. In 1988, Congress awarded restitution payments to survivors of the internment camps and apologised "on behalf of the people of the United States for the evacuation, relocation, and internment of such citizens and permanent resident aliens". In 2018, two Supreme Court justices criticised the decision and agreed that it no longer had the force of precedent.

Korematsu's conviction was voided in 1983

Fred Toyosaburo Korematsu was a 23-year-old Japanese-American man who refused to obey the order to relocate to an internment camp. He was arrested and convicted of violating Civilian Exclusion Order No. 34 of the U.S. Army. Korematsu challenged his conviction, arguing that Executive Order 9066, which authorised his internment, was unconstitutional and violated the Fifth Amendment.

On December 18, 1944, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that the federal government had the power to arrest and intern Korematsu, upholding his conviction. The Court found that the detention was a "military necessity" not based on race, but rather on "military dangers" and "military urgency". This decision has been widely criticised and rebuked, and it was only finally overturned in 2018.

In 1983, Korematsu challenged his conviction again, filing a writ of coram nobis that asserted the original conviction was flawed and represented a grave injustice. He presented evidence that the government had withheld information from the Supreme Court, including the Ringle Report, which concluded that very few Japanese individuals represented a risk and that most of those who did were already in custody.

On November 10, 1983, federal judge Marylyn Hall Patel overturned Korematsu's conviction, voiding it on the basis of prosecutorial misconduct. This cleared Korematsu's name, but the Supreme Court decision from 1944 remained as a discredited precedent. Korematsu became a civil rights activist, lobbying Congress to pass the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, which provided compensation and an apology to former wartime detainees.

The US government ordered 120,000 people of Japanese descent to be imprisoned

In 1942, two months after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, which authorised the U.S. War Department to create military areas from which any or all Americans could be excluded. This order was implemented three months later, and it applied to all Japanese-Americans in the U.S., regardless of whether they were suspected of sabotage or other conduct detrimental to the war effort. As a result of this order, 120,000 people of Japanese descent, most of them American citizens, were rounded up and imprisoned in internment camps.

The Supreme Court's Korematsu v. United States decision in 1944 upheld the constitutionality of these internment camps. The Court ruled that the federal government had the power to arrest and intern Fred Toyosaburo Korematsu, a 23-year-old man of Japanese descent, under Executive Order 9066. Korematsu had refused to go to an internment camp and had gone into hiding in Northern California. He was eventually arrested and convicted of violating the president's order. He appealed, arguing that internment based on race was unconstitutional.

The Korematsu decision has been widely criticised and described as "an odious and discredited artifact of popular bigotry". In subsequent years, the American internment policy has been met with harsh criticism. The Supreme Court's decision has been rebuked and criticised by many, including Supreme Court justices. In 1983, a California district court voided Korematsu's conviction on the grounds that Solicitor General Charles H. Fahy had suppressed a report from the Office of Naval Intelligence, which stated there was no evidence that Japanese Americans were acting as spies for Japan. This was further supported by the Ringle Report, which also concluded that there was no indication that Japanese Americans were acting as spies or sending signals to enemy submarines.

In 1988, Congress awarded restitution payments of $20,000 to each survivor of the 10 camps as part of the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, and Congress apologised "on behalf of the people of the United States for the evacuation, relocation, and internment of such citizens and permanent resident aliens." The original convictions of Hirabayashi and Korematsu were overturned by federal courts, and in 1998, President Bill Clinton awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Korematsu.

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The decision has been widely criticised and rebuked

The Korematsu v. United States decision has been widely criticised and rebuked. In 1944, the Supreme Court ruled that the federal government had the power to arrest and intern Fred Toyosaburo Korematsu under President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Executive Order 9066. This decision has been described as "gravely wrong" and "an odious and discredited artifact of popular bigotry".

Justice Robert Jackson dissented from the majority opinion, arguing that Korematsu had been convicted of "an act not commonly thought a crime". He emphasised that Korematsu's mere presence in the state where he was born and had lived his entire life did not justify stripping him and other internees of their constitutionally protected civil rights.

In subsequent years, the decision has faced harsh criticism. In 1983, a federal judge overturned Korematsu's conviction, finding that the government had intentionally suppressed or destroyed evidence that Japanese Americans posed no military threat. This ruling cleared Korematsu's name, but the Supreme Court decision remained a discredited precedent.

In 1988, Congress passed the Civil Liberties Act, providing reparations to survivors of the internment camps and apologising "on behalf of the people of the United States" for the evacuation, relocation, and internment of Japanese Americans and permanent resident aliens. In 2018, the Supreme Court finally overruled the Korematsu decision in Trump v. Hawaii, with two justices criticising it and agreeing that it no longer had the force of precedent.

The conviction was overturned in 2018

During World War II, the United States forcibly relocated and incarcerated about 120,000 people of Japanese descent in ten concentration camps. These actions were initiated by Executive Order 9066, issued by President Franklin D. Roosevelt on February 19, 1942, following Imperial Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.

The Supreme Court ruled in a 6-3 decision that the federal government had the power to arrest and intern Fred Toyosaburo Korematsu under Executive Order 9066. The Court argued that race did not factor into the internment of Japanese Americans and that internment was a military necessity.

In 1983, legal historian Peter Irons discovered evidence that government officials withheld several documents from the Supreme Court, stating that Japanese Americans posed no military threat. With this information, Korematsu's attorneys appeared before the U.S. 9th Circuit Court in San Francisco, which vacated his conviction. Yasui's conviction was overturned in 1984, and Hirabayashi's two years later.

In June 2018, two Supreme Court justices criticized the decision and agreed that it no longer had the force of precedent, finally overturning the conviction. They stated that the "forcible relocation of U.S. citizens to concentration camps, solely and explicitly on the basis of race, is objectively unlawful and outside the scope of Presidential authority."

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