![]() As Justice Jackson warned in his dissent, the opinion remains a “loaded weapon, ready for the hand of any authority that can bring forward a plausible claim of an urgent need. Fred Korematsu did not receive legal vindication until 1983, when his criminal conviction was thrown out on the basis of flawed evidence. More than 120,000 innocent Americans were sent to concentration camps. ships by Japanese submarines, as well as “investigations made subsequent to the exclusion” (not in evidence), which supposedly confirmed that Japanese-Americans were disloyal.Īs Justice Murphy observed in his dissent, the reasons for the forced evacuation were “largely an accumulation of much of the misinformation, half-truths and insinuations that for years have been directed against Japanese Americans by people with racial and economic prejudices.” Subsequent research has revealed that the government intentionally misled the Court by relying upon evidence that it knew to be unreliable. Citing a previous case in which the Court upheld the conviction of another Japanese-American for violating General DeWitt’s curfew order, Justice Black determined that “exclusion from a threatened area, no less than a curfew, has a definite and close relationship to the prevention of espionage and sabotage.” In support of this “definite and close relationship,” Justice Black cited General DeWitt’s Final Report, which sought to connect Japanese espionage activity to the sinking of U.S. Supreme Court upheld DeWitt’s exclusion order. Fred Korematsu, one of the internees, challenged the constitutionality of his treatment under the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment. More than 120,000 Japanese-Americans were first subjected to curfew and exclusions from their homes and then relocated to internment camps. DeWitt, ordered the forcible removal of all Japanese-Americans from “military areas” within selected Western states. ![]() He appealed his conviction, and his case eventually reached the Supreme Court. Korematsu was convicted for disobeying this executive order. The commanding general of the Western Defense Command, John L. Fred Korematsu was a Japanese-American citizen who refused to relocate to one of the detention camps created during World War II by executive order specifically created to detain Japanese Americans. Roosevelt issued an executive order giving certain military commanders broad discretion to exclude people from areas of military significance. Was the internment of Japanese-Americans justified as a wartime exigency? This Homework Help video explores the story of Fred Korematsu and his legal battle against internment.Three months after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and Congress formally declared war on Japan, President Franklin D. How real was the threat of espionage?įaced with extensive questioning on this point by the Supreme Court in oral argument, Solicitor General Charles Fahy convinced a majority of the Justices that the detention of Japanese Americans was justified by “military necessity.” The surprise attack on Pearl Harbor was very real, as was the fear engendered by it. They lost most of the property they had entrusted to government authorities, but had no way of documenting their losses because they only had a few days’ notice to dispose of their property before reporting to assembly centers for relocation. The case was about whether it was okay for the government to. citizens, were deprived of their liberty and held in detention camps far from their former homes. United States was a case that went to the U.S. From April of 1942 until the end of the war in September of 1945, 110,000 persons of Japanese ancestry, most of them U.S. government ordered the relocation and detention of Japanese Americans living in that region. Based on advice from the military that there was a real threat of Japanese invasion of the west coast, as well as a credible danger of Japanese espionage, the U.S. (1919)? “When a nation is at war, many things that might be said in time of peace are such a hindrance to its effort that their utterance will not be endured so long as en fight, and that no Court could regard them as protected by any constitutional right.” After Japan attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the United States entered World War II, and faced once again the challenge of applying the Constitution’s guarantees in the context of wartime. ![]() Should the text of the Constitution be interpreted one way in peacetime and another way in wartime, as suggested for a unanimous Court in the World War I era by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes in Schenck v. Tension between liberty and security, especially in times of war, is as old as the republic itself. ![]() Finally, answer the Key Question in a well-organized essay that incorporates your interpretations of the Documents as well as your own knowledge of history. Read the Case Background and Key Question. ![]()
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