Forty years after his conviction, Fred Korematsu once again decided to challenge it. Korematsu's conviction was overturned by th
e United States District Court for the Northern District of California, the same Court that had originally convicted him. The case was heard as a corum nobis case. A writ of corum nobis is a remedy used only in special circumstances to correct errors in a criminal conviction. The court ruled that newly uncovered evidence revealed the existence of a manifest injustice which—had it been known at the time—would likely have changed the Supreme Court's decision. The decision rested on a series of documents recovered from the National Archives showing that the government had withheld important and relevant information from the Supreme Court that demonstrated that the Army had altered evidence to make it appear that Japanese Americans posed a greater threat of spying and disloyalty.
It is important to note that the corum nobis decision overturned Korematsu's conviction based on the faulty evidence, but did not overturn the constitutionality of the Supreme Court's decision. Why do you think the District Court did this? What do you think the Supreme Court should do with the evidence that showed what the Army did to the Japanese Americans living there during WWII?
Answer: About 10 weeks after the U.S. entered World War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt on February 19, 1942 signed Executive Order 9066. The order authorized the Secretary of War and the armed forces to remove people of Japanese ancestry from what they designated as military areas and surrounding communities in the United States. These areas were legally off limits to Japanese aliens and Japanese-American citizens.
The order set in motion the mass transportation and relocation of more than 120,000 Japanese people to sites the government called detention camps that were set up and occupied in about 14 weeks. Most of the people who were relocated lived on the West Coast and two-thirds were American citizens. In accordance with the order, the military transported them to some 26 sites in seven western states, including remote locations in Washington, Idaho, Utah, and Arizona.
