Righting Past Wrongs

In the early 1980s, legal scholar and historian Peter Irons and researcher Aiko Herzig-Yoshinaga found evidence that the U.S. government had knowingly suppressed, altered, and destroyed evidence while arguing the wartime Hirabayashi, Korematsu, and Yasui cases.

In the 1940s, Justice Department lawyer Edward Ennis wrote a number of memos reflecting on the “willful historical inaccuracies” of the War Department’s report on the reason for incarceration and noted that the Justice Department “has an obligation, within its own competence, to set the record straight so that the true history may ultimately become known.” The government refused to correct the record and presented false information to mislead the courts and the nation. At the time, it succeeded.

Using a writ of coram nobis procedure designed to correct egregious errors in criminal proceedings, three teams of lawyers argued for the three Supreme Court cases to be overturned. In all three cases, the lower federal courts vacated their convictions as a “manifest injustice” suffered by all incarcerated Japanese Americans (though they could not overrule the Supreme Court’s WWII decisions).