Feds Give Official "Confession of Error" in Korematsu Case

Legal rights advocates are hailing a public "confession" by the acting U.S. Solicitor General that the U.S. government wrongly suppressed evidence in the World War II conviction of two Japanese-American men who resisted internment of people of Japanese ancestry.

Oakland-born Fred Korematsu, whose conviction eventually was overturned and who received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1998, was prosecuted during the war along with Gordon Hirabayashi for not complying with the forced removal from the West Coast of more than 110,000 people of Japanese descent, most of whom were American citizens.

On May 20, Neal Katyal, Acting Solicitor General of the United States, issued an official Confession of Error, admitting that the office was wrong in defending the country's war-time internment policy. The U.S. Solicitor General is charged with representing the U.S. government in the Supreme Court.

Korematsu was arrested at age 23 on a downtown San Leandro street corner in 1942. It happened a month after he went into hiding for failing to report for deportation to an internment camp. He was tried and convicted for refusing military orders, a ruling which was upheld by United States Supreme Court in its 1944 decision Korematsu v United States.

In a statement last week, the Korematsu Institute in San Francisco said, "The 'confession of error,' posted by acting Solicitor General Neal Katyal on the (U.S. Justice) Department's website Friday, is the first such admission of wrongdoing since the 1940s, when the Supreme Court ruled against Korematsu and Hirabayashi, two young men who challenged the incarceration and related curfew orders that compromised the civil rights of Japanese Americans."

Katyal's admission of mistakes, which coincides with Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, said in part:

By the time the cases of Gordon Hirabayashi and Fred Korematsu reached the Supreme Court, the Solicitor General had learned of a key intelligence report that undermined the rationale behind the internment. The Ringle Report, from the Office of Naval Intelligence, found that only a small percentage of Japanese Americans posed a potential security threat, and that the most dangerous were already known or in custody. But the Solicitor General did not inform the Court of the report, despite warnings from Department of Justice attorneys that failing to alert the Court “might approximate the suppression of evidence.”

Hirabayashi's nephew, Lane Hirabayashi, a professor of Asian American studies at UCLA, called Katyal's statement "indeed momentous," and Korematsu's daughter, Karen Korematsu, co-founder of the Korematsu Institute, expressed appreciation for Katyal's "remarkable stand to correct the record."

"Let this be a constant reminder of how justice for all can only be achieved if the people responsible for upholding our rights act with integrity, responsibility and honesty," she said.

In  2009 locals overwhelmingly favored naming 's new ninth grade campus after the civil rights leader. After an effort led by now-Mayor Stephen Cassidy urging the Board of Education to do so, trustees voted unanimously to dedicate the campus in Korematsu's honor.

California commemorated the first ever Fred Korematsu Day of Civil Liberties and the Constitution on Jan.30, 2011.

Korematsu appealed his criminal conviction in 1983 and won. He later returned to San Leandro to reside, and was twice president of the San Leandro Lyons Club.

He continued his activism through speaking engagements and filing friend-of-the-court briefs on behalf of Muslim detainees in U.S. military prisons post-9/11, dying at age 86 in 2005. Hirabayashi, 93, was born in Seattle and is retired after many years teaching sociology at the University of Alberta.

The statement from the Korematsu Institute quoted Lorraine Bannai, a member of Korematsu's 1983 legal team, saying, "What Katyal has done is to acknowledge out loud that the nation, at the top-most echelon, failed to uphold justice. It doesn't heal the wounds, but it's the right thing to do."

Jennifer Courtney contributed to this story.