Is the section below regarding "Legal Legacy" what you're talking about
regarding several law suits:? If so, it should be noted key evidence was
withheld or destroyed, and documents were intensionally aaltered that
would have surely altered the decision of the Supreme Court regarding
these cases if all the facts had been honestly presented.
Also, the Supreme court did finally rule the internment of Japanese
Americans to be unconstitutional (eg see "The Internment ends" below.
Article I, Section 9 of the U.S. Constitution states "The privilege of
the writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in cases
of rebellion or invasion the public safety may require it." but gives
this authority to Congress, rather than the President.
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 &
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.[citation needed]
The internment of American citizen because of "FEAR" during WW II was
one of the saddest episodes of American History, and it is quit painful
to read the details of what transpired during the frenzy fear of war WWII.
#---------------------------------------------
The Internment ends
In December, 1944, the Supreme Court ruled the detainment of loyal
citizens unconstitutional. In early 1945, the government began clearing
individuals to return to the West Coast; on January 2, 1945, the
exclusion order was rescinded entirely. The internees then began to
leave the camps to rebuild their lives at home, although the relocation
camps remained open for residents who were not ready to make the move
back. The freed internees were given $25 and and a train ticket to their
former home and sent on their way. Some of the Japanese Americans
immigrated back to Japan, however the majority returned to their former
lives, to the very place where they had been openly ostracized.[1] The
fact that this occurred long before the Japanese surrender, while the
war was arguably at its most vicious, weighs against the claim that the
relocation was an essential security measure. However, it is also true
that the Japanese were clearly losing the war by that time, and were not
on the offensive. The last internment camp was not closed until
1946,[20] although all Japanese were cleared from the camps sometime in
1945.[citation needed]
One of the WRA camps, Manzanar, was designated a National Historic Site
in 1992 to "provide for the protection and interpretation of historic,
cultural, and natural resources associated with the relocation of
Japanese Americans during World War II" (Public Law 102-248). In 2001,
the site of the Minidoka War Relocation Center in Idaho was designated
the Minidoka Internment National Monument.
#------------------
Legal legacy
Several 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
<http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Yasui_v._United_States&action=edit>/
(1943), /Hirabayashi v. United States
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hirabayashi_v._United_States>/ (1943), /ex
parte Endo <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ex_parte_Endo>/ (1944), and
/Korematsu v. United States
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korematsu_v._United_States>/ (1944). In
/Yasui/ and /Hirabayashi/ the court upheld the constitutionality of
curfews based on Japanese ancestry; in /Korematsu/ the court upheld the
constitutionality of the exclusion order. In /Endo/, the court accepted
a petition for a writ of habeas corpus
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Writ_of_habeas_corpus> and ruled that the
WRA had no authority to subject a citizen whose loyalty was acknowledged
to its procedures.
Korematsu's and Hirabayashi's convictions were vacated in a series of
/coram nobis <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coram_nobis>/ cases in the
early 1980s. In the /coram nobis/ cases, federal district and appellate
courts ruled that newly uncovered evidence revealed the existence of a
huge unfairness which, had it been known at the time, would likely have
changed the Supreme Court
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supreme_Court_of_the_United_States>'s
decisions in the Yasui, Hirabayashi, and Korematsu cases.^[14]
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_American_internment#_note-hirabayashi>
^[5]
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_American_internment#_note-korematsu_majority>
These new court decisions rested on a series of documents recovered from
the National Archives
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Archives_and_Records_Administration>
showing that the government had altered, suppressed and withheld
important and relevant information from the Supreme Court, most notably,
the Final Report by General DeWitt justifying the internment program.
The Army had destroyed documents in an effort to hide the fact that
alterations had been made to the report.^[14]
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_American_internment#_note-hirabayashi>
The /coram nobis/ cases vacated the convictions of Korematsu and
Hirabayashi (Yasui passed away before his case was heard, rendering it
moot), and are regarded as one of the impetuses for the Civil Liberties
Act of 1988 <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Liberties_Act_of_1988>.
It is important to note, however, that while the /coram nobis/ cases
totally undermined the /factual/ underpinnings of the 1944 Korematsu and
Hirabayashi cases, the /legal/ conclusions in Korematsu, specifically,
its expansive interpretation of government powers in wartime, were not
overturned. They are still the law of the land because a lower court
cannot overturn a ruling by the Supreme Court. In light of this fact, a
number of legal scholars have expressed the opinion that the original
Korematsu and Hirabayashi decisions have taken on an added relevance in
the context of the War on terror
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_on_terror>.
* Irons, Peter. (1976, 1996). /Justice At War: The Story/
#---------------------------------
Regards,
LelandJ
Pete Theisen wrote:
> On Saturday 19 May 2007 2:23 pm, Leland F. Jackson, CPA wrote:
>
>> Also, it should be noted that the Japanese Americas, who were placed
>> into internment, were not in a position where they could bring a law
>> suit aginst the US government for the reprehensible treatment that so
>> violated them as human being and violated their constitutional rights as
>> American Citizens, so there was no way where such a suit could have
>> found its way to the Supreme Court throught appeal for a ruling.
>>
>
> Hi Leland!
>
> Oh, for heaven's sake read the article. There were all kinds of suits,
> several
> of which made it to the Supreme Court, and this is how the internment was
> upheld by the Supreme Court.
>
> I remember one when time I was in some little truck stop or rest area in
> western Texas. Two California teenage girls were asking truck drivers how to
> get to some army base or another, where one of them wanted to visit a
> boyfriend.
>
> I told them it was two day's drive from where we were once I saw where it
> was.
> They thought since it was just 8 inches or so on the map . . . Build the camp
> out there.
>
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