![]() Rulings overturning Hirabayashi and Yasui’s convictions followed. In 1983, federal Judge Marilyn Hall Patel announced to a packed courtroom that she was vacating Fred Korematsu’s conviction. Based on these revelations, a team of attorneys - many descendants of those who were incarcerated - filed cases to overturn the criminal convictions of Korematsu, Hirabayashi, and Yasui, all of whom had been found guilty of violating government orders. In 1983, legal historian Peter Irons and researcher Aiko Herzig-Yoshinaga discovered documents revealing that during World War II, government attorneys had withheld, altered, and destroyed evidence favorable to Japanese Americans and made false claims to the Supreme Court that they represented a security threat. It took decades before Fred Korematsu, Gordon Hirabayashi and Minoru Yasui would be vindicated, along with those who defied the prevailing wartime fervor to represent them. The Supreme Court upheld the convictions of Hirabayashi and Yasui for violating curfew restrictions, and Korematsu for disobeying forced removal orders, citing “military necessity.” Later, he learned from the FBI that the military’s claims of Japanese American espionage were false and asked the Justice Department not to introduce those claims to the Supreme Court in the Korematsu case. Before Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, Ennis - a former member of the National Lawyers Guild - had argued among his government colleagues that mass removal of Japanese Americans would be unconstitutional. ![]() After the Justice Department’s Ennis (who would go on to work for the ACLU, and ultimately serve as its president) encouraged the national ACLU’s involvement in Korematsu’s Supreme Court argument, Baldwin enlisted prominent Washington, D.C., attorney Charles Horsky to represent the ACLU along with Wayne Collins. ![]() Baldwin helped recruit an attorney to argue Hirabayashi’s case before the high court, and national ACLU attorney Osmond Fraenkel was involved in writing a brief to the Supreme Court attacking the military’s discriminatory treatment of Japanese Americans, but not Executive Order 9066. In March 1944, he wrote to national ACLU attorney Osmond Fraenkel, “I cannot forget that the people at Manzanar are this year beginning the third year of their detention and that, although this is the biggest issue the ACLU has faced in its history, the National Office as such has started no test cases.”īy the time the Yasui, Hirabayashi and Korematsu cases reached the Supreme Court in 1943, the national office had relented somewhat. A month later, the national office congratulated the military for the “efficient manner” in which it removed Japanese Americans from the West Coast.īesig had no patience for this diplomacy. These contacts were not exactly adversarial: In October 1942, the national ACLU praised the government for instituting a policy allowing Japanese Americans to leave the camps for areas outside the exclusion zone. On the East Coast, Baldwin and other ACLU representatives were hoping to mitigate the impact of the mass incarceration through back-door discussions with government officials, including Attorney General Francis Biddle Edward Ennis, head of the Justice Department’s Enemy Alien Division and Dillon Myer, director of the War Relocation Authority, the civilian agency overseeing the camps. The second resolution affirmed the government’s right to establish military zones and to force citizens and non-citizens from those areas if their presence threatened national security, even in the absence of a declaration of martial law. ![]() To resolve the dispute, the national board asked its National Committee, a group of more than 70 ACLU members across the country who advised the board on contentious issues, to vote on two competing resolutions: One resolution objected to the mass removal of Japanese Americans and authorized the ACLU to challenge government orders restraining citizens’ rights in the absence of an immediate military threat. Most national board members believed that national security concerns took precedence over individual rights during wartime. A significant faction of the national ACLU board - an unlikely combination of liberals loyal to Roosevelt who believed they could impact federal policy through the “old boys network” behind the scenes, and legal conservatives who saw no constitutional problem with Executive Order 9066 - vigorously opposed Finerty’s proposal.
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