Court Opinion

ID: 9653536
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-23 17:48:23.644521+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:12:59.891899
License: Public Domain

DENMAN, Circuit Judge
(dissenting).
One, at least, of my associates seems of the opinion that it is not within the power of a participating member of the court to dissent from the decision of the court that it certify questions to the Supreme Court under section 239 of the Judicial Code, 28 U.S.C.A. § 346, or from the content of the certificate. With this contention I do not agree.
Certification is a judicial action vitally affecting the litigants, since it transfers from one tribunal to another the forum of adjudication of the questions certified. One of the primary issues argued here is one of classification of Japanese descended citizens from other citizens descended from aliens of countries with which we are at war. The validity of such a classification is entirely a question of fact largely in the ill-defined area of judicial notice. The Supreme Court in civil cases takes judicial notice of the laws of the several states, yet believes justice is better served in most such cases if such questions are left to the respective circuit courts of appeals. If this be true of civil cases, it is true a fortiori of such criminal cases as those involving psychological facts which, in my opinion, alone could warrant the discriminating cruelty with which these Mongoloid people have been treated.
Entirely apart from the question of costs of a second presentation to a distant tribunal, these unfortunate persons (if the certificate is granted) will have the decision of these questions of fact removed from the circuit court of appeals which is best qualified to find them. I dissent from a certification which denies to Hirabayashi* the exercise of our special knowledge of the psychology of these deported citizens. In this connection, Supreme Court rule 37(1) provides that our “certificate shall contain a statement of the nature of the cause and of the facts on which such question or proposition of law arises.” (Emphasis supplied).
If it be unusual for a judge of a court in which he is a participant to dissent from his associates on the matter of a certification, the occasion is even more unusual.
Under the threat of penitentiary sentences to these 70,000 American citizens who have relied on the right they believe, the Constitution gives them, we are driving from their homes to internment camps, not men alone, as with the deportation of the Dutch by the Germans, but their wives and children, without giving the latter the choice to remain in their homes. We are destroying their businesses, in effect, as if such citizens were enemy aliens. The destruction of their business connections means for many that they will not be able to return to their native areas; in effect, as were the French Canadians so taken to Louisiana.
While none of the appellants had yet been interned, the deportation order was but the initial step in a single plan ending in imprisonment in barb wired enclosures under military guard. Descended from Eastern Asiatics, they have been imprisoned as the Germans imprisoned the Western Asiatic descended Jews.
The first omission of fact from the certificate, which I regard as prejudicial to the appellants, is the admission by the Government, at the hearing here, that not *301one of these 70,000 Japanese descended citizen deportees had filed against him in any federal court of this circuit an indictment or information charging espionage, sabotage or any treasonable act. This admission covered the five months from Pearl Harbor to General DeWitt’s deportation order of May 10, 1942. I dissent from the absence of such an admission of fact from the certificate.
I also dissent from the omission from the certificate of the following facts concerning the issue of a “present danger of immediate evil [sabotage and espionage] 1 or an intent to bring it about,”2 which would warrant General DeWitt’s order, in effect, of deportation of citizens without trial for their immediate imprisonment. They are facts from which pertinent inferences may be drawn regarding the psychologic impulses and impelling convictions and personal loyalties and sympathies of a yellow Mongoloid body of citizens living in a predominantly Caucasian society and subject to legal and social compulsions because of race and color.
It is a matter of common knowledge to people of detached thinking in Pacific Coast communities, formerly living among these deported citizens, that their Mongoloid features and yellow skins have among them many persons of the same high spirit, intellectual integrity and consciousness of social obligation as have the most civilized of the surrounding Caucasians. What is also pertinent is the fact that they have the same contempt for any hypocrisy in their treatment by their white neighbors, and the same bitter resentment of a claim of their social inferiority as Americans have of the Nazi claim of Nordic racial supremacy. It is in the normal reactions of human beings to such treatment that are found factors in the problem of the validity of General DeWitt’s orders.
Another admission of fact made at the hearing and not appearing in the record or in the certificate, is the presence among these citizens of a group of young men educated in Japan and returned to the United States to live in the Japanese communities. These men were admitted to be dangerously sympathetic with Japan in the present war.
What is peculiarly within our knowledge is that in our Pacific Coast schools, in their infancy and early childhood, the Japanese and Chinese children mix freely with their white companions. They are taught to revere the flag with the freedoms it connotes. When they reach adolescence, with its mating instincts and its inevitable affections, which often know no boundaries set by complexion or cheekbones or slant of the eyes, freedom is denied them in the most powerful of human instincts by the laws against intermarriage with the Caucasians.2a- The strongest paternal discipline is exercised over the white children. They are told it is a degredation to mate with an Oriental; and the yellow skinned youth are made to feel *302a racial inferiority and in social contempt. Such facts are pertinent in determining whether General DeWitt is entitled to find, among a people suffering an humiliation so inconsistent with the equality of the flag teachings, that there will be those who will hesitate or fail to perform a citizen’s duty in aiding his soldiers against the saboteur or spy.
The second most powerful indicium in the war zone commanded by General DeWitt of separateness and implied racial inferiority of the Mongoloid people, are the laws prohibiting them from owning agricultural land.3 Many of the Japanese who immigrated here were farmers. Yet under these laws no child of Japanese parentage can be born on his alien father’s farm. State decisions4 show the evasions and deceits employed to satisfy that farmer’s historic land hunger, which led to our own early westward migrations of the last century. Whether or not it is still a proper concept that the farmers constitute the “backbone of the nation,” these 70,000 citizens know that those in farming communities are separated from their white companions by a fundamental social distinction, sometimes the more bitter in its expression by their European descended neighbors because of the superiority often shown by the Japanese in both energy and agricultural skill. These facts are entitled to be considered with reference to the likelihood of disaffection among a class so treated, in determining General DeWitt’s regulations for exclusion of dangerous people from the war areas bordering the Pacific.
A third distinction, the subject of long and repeated protest from Mongoloid China and Japan, is in the Congressional laws for the exclusion of their nationals from the immigration quotas of the Europeans, the Semitic and part Semitic Western Asiatics, and the Russians of part Mongoloid blood. Neither General DeWitt nor this court is concerned with the political or social justification of this stigma on the Mongolian, but both are concerned with its effect on proud spirited people so branded by the Congress. This court, however, is in a better position than any other to know the effect of such facts on the minds of some of the now deported citizens.
A fourth discrimination of race and color is the exclusion of these citizens from many labor unions. Nothing but the stress of war gives the special permits which allow the Chinese to work in some of our war industries. Despite the outstanding mechanical skill of the Mongolian people, the freedom to make a skilled living is denied to the youth taught in our schools to point their hands at the flag which, they are told, promises each of them the dignity of equality of opportunity among his fellows.
One is not here concerned with the vigorous dispute as to the wisdom of such laws, a dispute having on the one hand examples of persons of Europe, the United States and Latin America distinguished in statecraft, the sciences and the arts, who are of Eurasian blood, both immediate of Chinese and Japanese and other Asiatic origin, and more remotely through the American Indian, and on the other the frustrated rejects from the societies of each blood.
Such questions are for the peace table. The case is solely concerned with the question whether such laws and social and industrial regulations have created a real and present danger on the eastern littoral of the Pacific, in a war which the Japanese military caste is waging after, with the aid of assassination, it destroyed an evolving Japanese democracy, having ideals in common with our own.
As a result of these and other discriminations of race and color, the Japanese of our Pacific Coast cities and towns live in segregated quarters. Though compelled to reside there by social rather than governmental force, there are many similarities with the ghettos of Europe, — among them the denial of intermarriage, of land owning, and participating in many of the livelihoods of manual skill.
Because of such limitation or social intercourse, people do not become familiar with the Mongolian physiognomy. The uniform yellow skin and, on first impression, a uniformity of facial structure, make “all Chinks and Japs look alike to *303me,” a common colloquialism. Hence arises a difficulty for General DeWitt’s soldiers or the federal civil officers in picking out from the other Japanese crowded together in the segregated districts, and including men educated in Japan, the suspected saboteurs or spies or fugitives from a commando landing or hiding parachutists. Also the difficulty of identification of Japanese of known or suspected enemy aid, by descriptions telegraphed or written to white enforcement officers.
So far as concerns the imminence of danger of Japanese attack on the Pacific Coast, this court would be compelled to find that General DeWitt has a rational ground to except it. It is a fact of general knowledge that in every Japanese air attack on cities and military establishments, — among them Chungking, Singapore, Midway, Rangoon, Dutch Harbor, and the British naval station in Ceylon,— enough planes passed through the defenses of warned and expectant commanders to cause a conflagration sufficient to destroy the wooden cities of our Pacific Coast.
What is commonly known on the Pacific Coast and not elsewhere, is the fact that, unlike London with hundreds of simultaneous fires in its brick and stone structures and yet no great moving front of conflagration, in wooden-built San Francisco there was a conflagration front of a mile length within five hours of the earthquake of 1906. It was a coalescence of but seven fires. There, luckily, the earthquake placed in on the lee-side of the city, but one started by the Japanese on its windward side, in its long maintained northwest trade wind, well could have the bulk of the city in flames in ten hours. The earthquake left the exterior of the city’s frame buildings intact, save for some distortions which did not increase the conflagration hazard, but the present developed technique of shattering to pieces several acres of buildings with a single bomb, makes the debris of wooden material mere fuel piles for the succeeding inflammable projectiles. A similar conflagration danger exists in all the Pacific Coast cities. In all of them, General DeWitt well could fear the added menace of the saboteur’s torches.
Since the questions certified, in effect, transfer the entire case to the Supreme Court, it is unjust to the appellant to omit from the summary of the contentions on which he relied, his claim of violations of Constitutional provisions other than the due process clause of the fifth Amendment. He also urged here that such a classification of the Japanese descended citizens from others, in a unitary scheme leading to their imprisonment without a hearing, (1) made General DeWitt’s Congressionally authorized regulation a bill of attainder prohibited by Article I of the Constitution; (2) was merely an incident of a single continuing plan to seize his person in violation of the Fourth Amendment, and (3) that the scheme providing for deporting people from their homes to be imprisoned by the Military, without trial, is a cruel and unusual punishment in violation of the Eighth Amendment.
It is now nearly ten months since General DeWitt’s deportation order was made. The highest court of this great circuit is fully able to decide the submitted questions. Particularly it should not avoid their decision because, as stated in the certificate, they are “difficult” and “this court knows of no decision” for a precedent.5
*304The difference in time between certification and certiorari after our decision, is about four weeks if diligence is used by the Government in filing its sustaining or opposing brief. The time no doubt could be shortened by the agreement of counsel for the appellants seeking the freedom of their clients. Because of this difference in time, certiorari might cause the Supreme Court to reconvene later in June,6 as it did in the much lesser important cases of Ex parte Quirin and others, argued July 29 and July 30, 1942. 317 U.S. 1, 63 S.Ct. 1, 2.
Under similar orders all the 70,000 Japanese descended citizens long since have been removed from the Military District No. 1 and now present no danger of sabotage or espionage. It is my opinion that a month’s delay, coming after the elapse of the ten months in which the order in question has been in existence, does not warrant the avoidance of a decision of this circuit court of appeals on the matters of law and of fact involved in the appeals.
For the above reasons I dissent from the attempt by certification to avoid a decision of the only questions involved in the appeal and, if it is to be avoided, from omitting from the certificate the facts relied upon by Hirabayashi and several of his contentions. It is pertinent that the certificate then voted for and signed by a majority of this court was first seen by me yesterday (March 27th) and after protest ordered sent and sent yesterday by airmail to the Supreme Court. Our rule of practice allows ten days to distribute the dissent for its consideration prior to filing a majority decision, here to certify. Though but two days were requested, after which there is abundant time for the arrival of the certificate and its consideration before the next session of the Supreme Court, this court denied any right to the filing of the dissent before the decision to certify was filed.
March 28, 1943.
WILLIAM DENMAN,
United States Circuit Judge
Endorsed: Opinion by DENMAN, Circuit Judge, on his dissent from the certification of questions to the Supreme Court, and from the omission of facts therefrom. Filed March 28, 1943, as amended by order of September 20, 1943. Paul P. O’Brien, Clerk.

 This certification omits the customary statement of doubt or disagreement as to our own answers to its questions, from which one of the inferences is that we have no such doubt.

 The President’s military zone and deportation order of February 19, 1942, and its enforcing provisions, are
“Whereas the successful prosecution of the war requires every possible protection against espionage and against sabotage to national defense material, national defense premises, and national defense utilities as defined in Section 4, Act of April 20, 1918, 40 Stat. 533, as amended by the Act of November 30, 1940, 54 Stat. 1220, and the Act of August 21, 1941, 55 Stat. 655, 50 U.S.O.A. § 104:
“Now, therefore, by virtue of the authority vested in me as President of the United States, and Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy, I hereby authorize and direct the Secretary of War, and the Military Commanders who he may from time to time designate, whenever he or any designated Commander deems such action necessary or desirable, to prescribe military areas in such places and of such extent as he or the appropriate Military Commander may determine, from which any or all persons may be excluded, and with respect to which, the right of any person to enter, remain in, or leave shall be subject -to whatever restrictions the Secretary of War or the appropriate Military Commander may impose in his discretion. • * *
“I hereby further authorize and direct the Secretary of War and the said Military Commanders to take such other steps as he or the appropriate Military Commander may deem advisable to enforce compliance with the restrictions applicable to each Military area hereinabove authorized to be designated, Including the use of Federal troops and other Federal Agencies, with authority to accept assistance of state and local agencies.” (Emphasis supplied.)

 Justice Holmes in Abrams v. United States, 250 U.S. 616, 628, 40 S.Ct. 17, 21, 63 L.Ed. 1173.

 California Civil Code § 60; 2 Idaho Gen.Laws Ann. § 31-206; Montana Civil Code § 5702; Arizona Code Ann. (1939) § 63-107.

 1913 Cal.Stat. 206, 1 Bearing Gen. Laws, Act 260 ; 5 Oregon Comp.Laws Ann. § 61-102; Washington, Rem.Rev.Stat. § 10582.

 People v. Osaki, 1930, 209 Cal. 169, 286 P. 1025; People v. Entriken, 1930, 106 Cal.App. 29, 288 P. 788; Takeuchi v. Schmuck, 1929, 206 Cal. 782, 276 P. 345; People v. Nakamura, 1932, 125 Cal.App. 268, 13 P.2d 805.

 The certificate’s recitals are
“This cause thus raises novel constitutional questions of great public importance pertaining to an exercise of the war powers to enforce two important regulations which form an important part of the wartime evacuation of the Pacific Coast Japanese population. This court is familiar with the decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States upholding broad exercises of the war powers of the Federal Government. On the one hand, however, this Court knows of no decision in which citizens residing in areas not subject to martial law have been required by military authorities to observe a curfew and ito report to military control stations for exclusion from a military area designated by the military authorities. On the other hand, this Court is sensible of the fact that the military authorities held the view that military exigencies of modern warfare imperiling the nation and existing on the Pacific Coast at the beginning of the present war were far more grave than any situation hitherto existing in any war with a foreign nation. No doubt because of the military authorities’ view of the extreme peril facing the nation this exercise of the war powers of the Federal Government was employed. The question whether this exercise of the war power can be reconciled with traditional standards of personal liberty and freedom guaranteed by the Constitution, is most difficult. This Court, therefore, pursuant to Judicial Code, Section 239, amended (28 U.S.C.A. § 346), certifies to the Supreme Court of *304the United States the following questions of law concerning which instructions are desired for the proper decision of the cause:” (Emphasis supplied.)

 The Supreme Court did not adjourn, until June 21, 1943 ; hence the time factor between certiorari on our decision and certification was negligible. Despite the haste in certification that Court declined to pass on the question of the power to imprison and deport the citizens of Japanese descent. Hirabayashi v. United States, 320 U.S. 81, 63 S.Ct. 1375, 1386, 87 L.Ed. 1774.