Fred Korematsu

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This article is about Fred Korematsu. For information on the Supreme Court decision, see Korematsu v. United States

Fred Toyosaburo Korematsu (是松豊三郎, January 30, 1919 – March 30, 2005) was one of the many Japanese-American citizens living on the West Coast during World War II. Shortly after the Imperial Japanese Navy attacked Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, authorizing the Secretary of War to require all Japanese-Americans in "Military Area No. 1" (the West Coast "exclusion zone") to report to the Internment Camps.

Fred Korematsu was born in 1919, to Japanese parents living in Oakland, California. He worked in his family nursery growing up. When General John L. DeWitt, commander of the Western Defense Area, ordered Japanese-American citizens to report to Assembly Centers as prelude to being removed to the camps, Mr. Korematsu refused and went into hiding. He changed his name and claimed to be of Spanish and Hawaiian heritage. He was captured on May 30, 1942, and was tried and convicted in federal court. He appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals. They upheld the original verdict. He appealed again and brought his case to the United States Supreme Court. On December 18, 1944, in a 6-3 decision, authored by Justice Black, the Court held that compulsory exclusion, though constitutionally suspect, is justified during circumstances of "emergency and peril". (See Korematsu v. United States for more information.)

However, the Court also decided Ex parte Endo in December of 1944, granting Mitsuye Endo her liberty from the camps because the Department of Justice and War Relocation Authority conceded that Ms. Endo was a "loyal and law-abiding citizen" and that no authority existed for detaining loyal citizens longer than necessary to separate the loyal from the disloyal. Ms. Endo's case did not address the question of whether the initial detention itself was constitutional, as did Mr. Korematsu's case.

In 1980, President Jimmy Carter appointed a special commission to investigate the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. The commission concluded that the decisions to remove those of Japanese ancestry to prison camps occurred because of "race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership." In 1988, Congress apologized and granted personal compensation of $20,000 to each surviving prisoner.

In the early 1980s, while researching a book on internment cases, lawyer Peter Irons came across evidence that when Charles Fahy, the Solicitor General of the United States, argued Korematsu v. United States before the Supreme Court, he had deliberately suppressed reports from the FBI and military intelligence which concluded that Japanese-American citizens posed no security risk. Along with a team of lawyers headed by Dale Minami, Irons filed a writ of coram nobis with the federal courts, seeking to overturn Korematsu's conviction. On November 10, 1983, Judge Marilyn Hall Patel of U.S. District Court in San Francisco formally vacated the conviction.

Under the ABA Model Rules of Professional Conduct (promulgated in 1983 as a result of the Watergate scandal), a prosecutor's deliberate suppression of exonerating evidence is grounds for disbarment. Fahy's actions are often mentioned in legal ethics textbooks as an example of why the modern rule is necessary.

In 1998, President Clinton awarded Korematsu with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Fred Korematsu died of respiratory failure at his daughter's home in Marin County, California on March 30, 2005.