People of Italian and German heritage were also detained. The controversial moves were met with legal challenges, which eventually were unsuccessful in freeing the detainees from the camps, despite the serious constitutional issues involved. Under another provision, called Exclusion Order No. Korematsu appealed his conviction through the legal system, and the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case in late The court had heard a similar case in , Hirabayashi v.
United States, and decided that Gordon Hirabayashi, a college student, was guilty of violating a curfew order. The Korematsu v.
United States decision referenced the Hirabayashi case, but it also ruled on the ability of the military, in times of war, to exclude and intern minority groups. The Court ruled in a 6 to 3 vote that the government had the power to arrest and intern Fred Korematsu.
Justice Hugo Black, writing for the majority, included a paragraph that is still debated today:. That is not to say that all such restrictions are unconstitutional. It is to say that courts must subject them to the most rigid scrutiny. Court of Appeals, which agreed with the trial court that he had violated military orders.
Korematsu asked the Supreme Court of the United States to hear his case. In , a pro bono legal team with new evidence re-opened the year-old case in a federal district court on the basis of government misconduct.
The official reports, including those from the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover, were not presented in court. Writing for the majority, Justice Hugo Black held that "all legal restrictions which curtail the civil rights of a single racial group are immediately suspect" and subject to tests of "the most rigid scrutiny," not all such restrictions are inherently unconstitutional.
In a strongly worded dissent, Justice Robert Jackson contended: "Korematsu Majority: Conviction affirmed. The Supreme Court ruled that the evacuation order violated by Korematsu was valid, and it was not necessary to address the constitutional racial discrimination issues in this case. Conviction affirmed. It consists merely of being present in the state whereof he is a citizen, near the place where he was born, and where all his life he has lived.
The majority opinion ruled that the court should not address the entirety of the order under which Korematsu was convicted, which included provisions requiring citizens to report to assembly and relocation centers. The majority found it necessary only to rule on the validity of the specific provision under which Korematsu was convicted: the provision requiring him to leave the designated area.
The majority ruled that there was sufficient danger and a sufficient relationship between the order and the prevention of the danger to justify requiring Korematsu to evacuate. The majority said the order was valid.
The dissenters disagreed. They put forth their position that the order should have been considered as a whole, and the Court should have considered the other contemporaneous orders, all of which, when considered together resulted in the imprisonment of U. Main content Facts and Case Summary — Korematsu v.
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