Opinion ID: 463698
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Deference and Concealment

Text: 8 In Hirabayashi v. United States, 320 U.S. 81, 63 S.Ct. 1375, 87 L.Ed. 1774 (1943), the Supreme Court considered the constitutionality of the curfew regulations imposed pursuant to Executive Order 9066. In Korematsu v. United States, 323 U.S. 214, 65 S.Ct. 193, 89 L.Ed. 194 (1944), the Court considered the constitutionality of the decision to exclude Japanese-Americans from the West Coast. In both cases the Court based its decision on the government's allegations of military necessity. In these two cases the Court erected a virtually insurmountable presumption of deference to the judgment of the military authorities. Appellants allege, however, that the application of this deferential standard was marred by the fraudulent concealment of evidence indicating that there was no rational basis for the mass evacuation program. 9 1. Hirabayashi: concealment of evidence and deference to the judgment of the war-making branches. The Department of Justice's basic argument in Hirabayashi rested on two propositions. First, various cultural characteristics suggested that there was a serious potential for disloyalty by some members of the Japanese-American community. Hirabayashi, Brief for the United States at 18-31. 8 Second, under the exigencies imposed by the military emergency, it was impossible to segregate the loyal from the disloyal. Id. at 61-63. This double-barrelled argument proved decisive. After reviewing the factors suggesting that members of the Japanese-American community might be disloyal, Chief Justice Stone concluded: 10 Whatever views we may entertain regarding the loyalty to this country of the citizens of Japanese ancestry, we cannot reject as unfounded the judgment of the military authorities and of Congress that there were disloyal members of that population, whose number and strength could not be precisely and quickly ascertained. We cannot say that the war-making branches of the Government did not have ground for believing that in a critical hour such persons could not readily be isolated and separately dealt with   . 11 320 U.S. at 99, 63 S.Ct. at 1385. The Court, however, did not purport to make an independent assessment of the evidence. As the Chief Justice indicated, the Court's decision rested first and foremost on a pivotal constitutional assumption: that where matters of national security are at issue, the Court must defer to the judgment of the military and of Congress 9 as the war-making branches. 12 As the Justice Department prepared its brief, however, Edward Ennis, the Director of the Alien Enemy Control Unit, came into possession of the intelligence work of one Lt. Commander Kenneth D. Ringle, an expert on Japanese intelligence in the Office of Naval Intelligence. 10 Ringle had reached conclusions directly contradicting the two key premises in the government's argument. Ringle argued that the cultural characteristics of the Japanese-Americans had not resulted in a high risk of disloyalty by members of that group. 11 Moreover, Ringle expressly concluded that individualized determinations could be made expeditiously: 13 [T]he entire Japanese Problem has been magnified out of its true proportion, largely because of the physical characteristics of the [Japanese] people   . [I]t should be handled on the basis of the individual, regardless of citizenship, and not on a racial basis. 14 K. Ringle, Report on the Japanese Question 3 (Jan. 26, 1942) (Ringle Report ), JA 93 (emphasis in original). 12 15 Ennis knew that Ringle's views could not be dismissed as those of a solitary dissident, for Ennis had been informed that Ringle's views were shared by his superiors at Naval Intelligence. E. Ennis, Memorandum for the Solicitor General (April 30, 1943) (Ennis I ) at 2, JA 116. Ennis also knew that the Army and Navy had previously agreed that Naval Intelligence would assume responsibility for the Japanese issue. 13 Nor did Ennis question the reliability of Ringle's report; on the contrary, he found Ringle's report the most reasonable and objective discussion of the security problem presented by the presence of the Japanese minority of all of the great numbers of reports, memoranda, and articles that he had perused over the previous year. Id. at 3, JA 117. And Ennis fully understood that Ringle's conclusions directly undermined the government's case. 14 He therefore concluded: 16 I think we should consider very carefully whether we do not have a duty to advise the Court of the existence of the Ringle memorandum and of the fact that this represents the view of the Office of Naval Intelligence. It occurs to me that any other course of conduct might approximate the suppression of evidence. 17 Ennis I at 4, JA 118. 18 Notwithstanding Ennis' plea, the Justice Department's brief made no mention of Ringle's analysis. 15 Equally important, it is now apparent that there were no countervailing professional intelligence analyses justifying the need for a mass evacuation based on race. 16 Thus the CWRIC concluded in 1982 that political pressure, not official intelligence analysis, produced the evacuation, that [i]ntelligence opinions were disregarded or drowned out, PERSONAL JUSTICE DENIED at 60, and that [t]he promulgation of Executive Order 9066 was not justified by military necessity   . Id. at 18. 19 Mere disclosure of Ringle's analysis to the Court, without more, would not likely have changed the result in Hirabayashi. 17 But disclosure combined with a concession that the government had no data rebutting Ringle's analysis would likely have influenced the outcome. And taken together, the suppression of the Ringle report and the absence of countervailing data suggest that the Justice Department misled the Supreme Court when it argued that military necessity justified a mass evacuation of Japanese-American citizens. 18 20 2. Korematsu: the presumption of deference becomes nearly irrebuttable. In preparing its Korematsu brief the Justice Department simply followed the path cut by Hirabayashi. See Korematsu, Brief for the United States at 11-12, 26. Similarly, in upholding the evacuation the Korematsu Court simply reiterated the Hirabayashi rationale: time was short, the situation grave, and it was impossible readily to distinguish the loyal from the disloyal. 323 U.S. at 218-19, 65 S.Ct. at 194-95. 19 21 In Korematsu, however, unlike Hirabayashi, the litigants provided the Court with a wealth of factual material attacking the factual predicates of the government's argument. See, e.g., Korematsu, Brief of Japanese-American Citizens League. Yet for the majority the presumption of deference to the war-making branches, articulated in Hirabayashi, settled the matter. 323 U.S. at 218-19, 65 S.Ct. at 194-95. 22 By 1944 the Court could rest its presumption of deference to the military judgment on seemingly firmer ground than had been available in Hirabayashi. In the interim the War Department had issued an official analysis of the exclusion and internment program, General DeWitt's Final Report, Japanese Evacuation from the West Coast, 1942 (1943) (Final Report ), supplying facts supporting the conclusions of the Final Recommendation. Although much of the Final Report addressed the issue whether members of the Japanese-American community had actually engaged in espionage or sabotage, the Report did purport to provide factual support for the key premises of the Hirabayashi decision: there was widespread disloyalty in the Japanese-American community and it was impossible to separate the loyal from the disloyal in an efficient manner. See Hohri, 586 F.Supp. at 777. 23 Recently uncovered documents, however, suggest that the Justice Department was less than fully candid in revealing to the Court the untrustworthy character of the Final Report. For example, the Final Report alleged that Japanese-Americans had been engaged in shore-to-ship radio and light signaling to Japanese warships, facilitating attacks on American ships or shore installations. Id. at 4. By the spring of 1944, however, the Attorney General had learned the allegations of shore-to-ship signaling were baseless. See Letter from FCC Chairman Fly to Attorney General Biddle (April 4, 1944), JA 101-104 (noting that the evacuation appeared to have no effect on radio signaling); Burling, Memorandum for the Attorney General (April 12, 1944), JA 119 (discussing letter of FBI Director Hoover on shore-to-ship signaling). Once again, Ennis had demanded full disclosure and had drafted a footnote for the government's brief to that effect, reading: 24 The Final Report of General DeWitt (which is dated June 5, 1943, but which was not made public until January 1944) is relied on in this brief for statistics and other details concerning the actual evacuation and the events that took place subsequent thereto. The recital of circumstances justifying the evacuation as a matter of military necessity, however, is in several respects, particularly with reference to the use of illegal radio transmitters and to shore-to-ship signalling by persons of Japanese ancestry, in conflict with information in the possession of the Department of Justice. In view of the contrariety of the reports on this matter we do not ask the Court to take judicial notice of the recital of those facts contained in the report. 25 Quoted in Hohri, 586 F.Supp. at 780. After heated negotiations with attorneys for the War Department, see E. Ennis, Memorandum for Mr. Herbert Wechsler (Sept. 30, 1944) (Ennis II ), JA 120, however, Justice merely inserted the following, ambiguous, footnote in its brief: 26 The Final Report of General DeWitt (which is dated June 5, 1943 but which was not made public until January 1944), hereinafter cited as Final Report, is relied on in this brief for statistics and other details concerning the actual evacuation and the events that took place subsequent thereto. We have specifically recited in this brief the facts relating to the justification for the evacuation, of which we ask the Court to take judicial notice, and we rely on the Final Report only to the extent that it relates to such facts. 27 Korematsu, Brief for the United States at 11 n. 2. Thus the final footnote did not adequately alert the Justices to the lack of empirical data supporting the government's claims. 20 For the Korematsu majority, DeWitt's statement was the official view of one of the war-making branches, 323 U.S. at 218, quoting Hirabayashi, 320 U.S. at 99, 63 S.Ct. at 1385. As noted in Hirabayashi, in times of military emergency the Court believed that such war-making branches need only have a rational basis for race-related classifications. 320 U.S. at 102, 63 S.Ct. at 1386. 21 And the mere fact that the military's conclusions were hotly disputed, see, e.g., Korematsu, Brief of Japanese-American Citizens League, did not make them irrational. Finally, the fact that Congress had repos[ed] its confidence in this time of war in our military leaders--as inevitably it must, Korematsu, 323 U.S. at 223, 65 S.Ct. at 197, left little room for judicial reevaluation. 22 28 Thus in Korematsu the Court crystallized the presumption of deference first articulated in Hirabayashi. Once again, the application of this presumption was marred by a failure on the part of the Justice Department to disclose the questionable credibility of the War Department pronouncements. The Court effectively announced that given this presumption of deference no mere incremental evidentiary showing could change its view of the case. Indeed, given the constitutional underpinnings of the Court's holding, it would appear that only a statement by one of the political branches, purporting to assess the evidence as a whole, could have altered the result. 29