KOREMATSU V. UNITED STATES
Korematsu v. United States, 323 U.S. 214, 65 S. Ct. 193, 89 L. Ed. 194 (1944), was a controversial 6–3 decision of the Supreme Court that affirmed the conviction of a Japanese American citizen who violated an exclusion order that barred all persons of Japanese ancestry from designated military areas during WORLD WAR II. Fred Toyosaburo Korematsu, an American citizen of Japanese descent, was convicted in federal court for remaining in a designated military area in California contrary to a Civilian Exclusion Order issued by an army general that required persons of Japanese ancestry to report to assembly centers as a prelude to mass removal from the West Coast. He unsuccessfully appealed his conviction to the circuit court of appeals and was granted certiorari by the Supreme Court.
The order that Korematsu was convicted of violating was based upon an EXECUTIVE ORDER, which authorized the military commander to establish military zones and impose restrictions on activities or order exclusion from those areas in order to protect against ESPIONAGE and sabotage. Federal law made violation of these orders a crime. The entire West Coast and southern Arizona were designated as military zones. The restriction and exclusion orders applied to all enemy ALIENS and additionally to American citizens of Japanese ancestry. Pursuant to the executive order, another order imposed an 8 P.M.to 6 A.M. curfew on all persons of Japanese ancestry in designated West Coast military areas. This order and a conviction based on it was challenged in Hirabayashi v. United States, 320 U.S. 81, 63 S.Ct. 1375, 87 L.Ed. 1774 (1943), but the Supreme Court upheld the order as “ ‘protection against espionage and against sabotage’” and sustained the conviction. The Court relied upon that case as support for its refusal to rule that Congress and the president exceeded their war powers in excluding persons of Japanese descent
from the West Coast in Korematsu. Although it
acknowledged that being prohibited from the
area where one’s home is located is a more severe
hardship than a ten-hour curfew, the Court
accepted the claims of the government that such
drastic measures were necessary to adequately
protect the country.
At the start of the majority opinion, the
Court stated that any legal restriction that
infringes upon the CIVIL RIGHTS of a particular
race is “immediately suspect.” However, it con-
tinued, not all restrictions are unconstitutional.
Such limitations are valid when dictated by pub-
lic necessity, but they must withstand rigid judi-
cial scrutiny in order to be upheld. The
restrictions imposed upon Japanese Americans
were deemed by the Court to be necessary for
public security during time of war.
Korematsu argued that the rationale of the
Court in Hirabayashi was erroneous and that
when the order in question was promulgated
there was no longer any danger of a Japanese
invasion of the West Coast. The Court rejected
these arguments. Both the curfew and exclusion
orders were necessary, since disloyal Americans
of Japanese origin could not be easily segregated
until subsequent investigations took place.
Although the hardship of exclusion fell upon
many loyal people, the Court viewed it as one of
the harsh results of modern warfare.
The Court affirmed Korematsu’s conviction,
which has been cited by constitutional scholars
as the foundation of the STRICT SCRUTINY test
that is applied to suspect classifications made by
the government.
In 1983, upon a challenge by Korematsu who
was represented by the AMERICAN CIVIL LIBER-
TIES UNION and the Japanese American Citizens
League, U.S. district court judge Marilyn Hall
Patel vacated the forty-year-old conviction. Based
upon newly discovered evidence—previously
withheld government documents—the judge
found that the new evidence demonstrated “that
the Government knowingly withheld informa-
tion from the Courts when they were considering
the critical question of military necessity in this
case.” The judge added that “justices of [the
Supreme] Court and legal scholars have com-
mented that the [Korematsu] decision is an
anachronism in upholding overt RACIAL DIS-
CRIMINATION as ‘compellingly justified,’ and that
the Korematsu case lies overruled in the court of
history.”
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