Court Opinion

ID: 9651272
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-23 16:12:14.999944+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:12:31.576707
License: Public Domain

*442DENMAN, Circuit Judge
(concurring).
I concur in the opinion and its reasoning.
In addition, I feel that these young men should be considered by the executive as the subject of its clemency. They were United States citizens and only attempted to give up their citizenship after a continued illegal imprisonment by the Federal Government in barbed wire enclosures, guarded by armed soldiers, under conditions of great oppression and humiliation. Ex parte Endo, 323 U.S. 283, 65 S.Ct. 208, 89 L.Ed. 243.
Had any one of us been so wrongfully imprisoned in our youth because our parents had emigrated to this country from, say, Germany, England, or Ireland, with which there might be a war, it cannot be said that our exasperation and shame would not have caused us to prefer the citizenship of our parents’ homeland. It was because the United States first cruelly wronged us by an illegal if not criminal imprisonment that our renunciation came. Even if, in our justifiable resentment, we committed acts adverse to the continuance of the war against our fatherland, it is for the United Stales, the first and greater wrongdoer, to be merciful.
Because our skins are white and our origin is European, is no ground for a distinction between our youth and that of these appellants.