Japanese Internment Suit Sent Back to Lower Court : New Ruling in Case May Take Years

The Supreme Court today threw new obstacles into the path of Japanese-Americans seeking damages for their World War II mass internment in U.S. camps, telling a lower court to study the case.

The justices, by an 8-0 vote, said the case was handled by the wrong federal appeals court last year.

“I think the Supreme Court ducked it,” said Dale Minami, a San Francisco lawyer representing one of the 120,000 U.S. citizens and resident aliens of Japanese ancestry forced to live in detention camps for up to four years.

The decision left the outcome of a 1983 suit filed by 19 Japanese-Americans still in doubt. One high-court member, Justice Harry A. Blackmun, predicted the controversy “will be back in this court once again months or years hence.”

Ordered to Stand Trial

The U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia had ruled that the government must defend itself at trial against the suit, which seeks compensation for property losses suffered by those interned.

The Supreme Court said today that the issue of whether the lawsuit was filed within the legal deadline should have been decided by another federal court based in the nation’s capital, the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit.

The Reagan Administration, although calling the banishment “a deplorable episode” in American history, had urged the justices either to kill the suit or send it back to the federal circuit court.

In an opinion written by Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr., the court selected the second alternative.

Case Watched Closely

Although it was expected that the decision would be a technical one, centered on questions of legal jurisdiction or a statute of limitations, the case had been watched closely as the court’s first opportunity to comment on its 1944 ruling that condoned the internment.

But Powell’s opinion, and a separate concurring opinion by Blackmun, barely mentioned the underlying facts that sparked the lawsuit.

Nothing in either opinion attempted to explain, justify or apologize for the 1944 ruling, in which none of the court’s nine current justices participated.

In the wake of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, the federal government forcibly removed from their homes Japanese-Americans and Japanese citizens living in California and parts of Oregon, Washington and Arizona.

Authorized by Roosevelt

The action was authorized by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was advised by military leaders that the loyalty to the United States of people of Japanese descent could not be trusted.

Before the Roosevelt Administration decided to end the internment program, the Supreme Court upheld it as a constitutionally acceptable military necessity. Government documents discovered later indicate no such military necessity existed.

The appeals court said the government may have to pay “just compensation” for property losses suffered by those imprisoned who were not among the 28,000 people compensated under a 1948 law providing some benefits. But the appeals court said the government need not pay damages for other asserted constitutional violations.

In another major decision today, the justices--confronting the issue of public employee drug testing for the first time--allowed the U.S. Customs Service to resume, at least temporarily, testing workers who want promotions to drug enforcement jobs.

Voting 8 to 1, the justices rejected a union’s emergency request to block the tests pending the court’s further review of the case.