"If you have the feeling that something is wrong, don't be afraid to speak up."
Fred Korematsu
Fred Korematsu Chronology
May 30, 1942
Fred Toyosaburo Korematsu, son of Japanese immigrants, was born in Oakland, California, on January 30, 1919. On May 30, 1942, after evading Public Law 503, Koremastu was arrested, jailed, and convicted in a federal court. Ernest Besig, director of the American Civil Liberties Union-Northern California (ACLU-NC) asked Korematsu to be "the test case to challenge the constitutionality of the government's imprisonment of Japanese Americans." [1] |
" Fred’s decision to suffer the public condemnation of arrest and imprisonment to do what was right .....should continue to inspire us today."
Dorothy M. Ehrlich, Remembering Civil Liberties Hero Fred Korematsu, www.aclu.org
Fred Korematsu, "believing the discriminatory conviction went against freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution"[1], and the "ACLU-NC took the case all the way to the United States Supreme Court, arguing that the exclusion and detention laws violated basic constitutional rights." [2] |
"Am I an American or not? " Fred Korematsu, after hearing about the decision in his Supreme Court case
December 18, 1944
On December 18, 1944, the Supreme Court, in a 6-3 decision, upheld Korematsu's federal conviction. Justice Black delivered the majority opinion, rejecting Korematsu's contention that the internment of Japanese Americans violated their constitutional rights. |
"We are in possession of information that shows that the War Department's report on the internment is a lie. " 1943 Memorandum written by Justice Department Attorneys Edward Ennis and John L. Burling to Solicitor General Fahey. Legal researcher, Peter Iron's discovery of this memorandum led to the reopening of the Korematsu coram nobis case.
January 19, 1983
More than forty years after the landmark Supreme Court decision, Attorney Peter Irons organized a legal team of Japanese American lawyers and filed a writ of coram nobis* petition on behalf of Fred Korematsu in the Federal District Court for the Northern District of California. *A writ of coram nobis is an order by an appeals court to a lower court to consider facts not on the trial record which might have changed the outcome of the lower court case if known at the time of trial. Coram nobis is a Latin term meaning the "error before us." www.uslegal.com |
" We are here today to seek a measure of the justice denied to Fred Korematsu and the Japanese-American community 40 years ago." Dale Minami's opening statement for the November 10, 1983 Trial
"...in our times of international hostility and antagonisms our institutions...must be prepared to protect all citizens from the ...prejudices that are easily aroused."
Judge Marilyn Hall Patel's official opinion released April 19, 1984
November 19, 1983
Judge Marilyn Hall Patel of the U.S. District Court of Northern California in San Francisco reversed Korematsu's conviction. She acknowledged that his treatment and the all those interned was a "manifest injustice." However, this decision did not change the US Supreme Court decision. "Although Judge Patel’s ruling cleared Korematsu’s conviction, the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1944 ruling still stands. It would require a similar test case, involving a mass banishment of a single ethnic group, to challenge the original Supreme Court decision." [1] |
"This court's decision today does not reach any errors of law suggested by petitioner. At common law, the writ of coram nobis was used to correct errors of fact. It was not used to correct legal errors and this court has no power, nor does it attempt, to correct any such errors.
Thus, the Supreme Court's decision stands as the law of this case and for whatever precedential value it may still have." Judge Marilyn Hall Patel's official opinion released April 19, 1984
Thus, the Supreme Court's decision stands as the law of this case and for whatever precedential value it may still have." Judge Marilyn Hall Patel's official opinion released April 19, 1984