Send Suit by Japanese-Americans to Lower Court : Justices Sidestep Internment Case Ruling

The Supreme Court sidestepped a ruling Monday on whether the Japanese-Americans who were interned during World War II are deserving of compensation, concluding instead that the case must be heard first by a lower federal court.

Forty-three years ago, the high court upheld the rounding up of 120,000 Japanese-Americans on the West Coast. The current case was seen as an opportunity for the justices to reconsider, or perhaps apologize for, the earlier decision.

Even government attorneys conceded during a court hearing that the mass internment was “a deplorable episode in our history.”

Unanimous Opinion

But, in a brief unanimous opinion Monday, the justices said almost nothing about internment and sent the case back to follow a different route through the courts.

“This is a disappointment, but we will persevere to see that the rights of the plaintiffs are vindicated,” said Benjamin Zelenko, a Washington lawyer representing 19 Japanese-Americans who filed suit seeking billions of dollars in damages for civil rights violations and for property losses during the internment.

Zelenko said he was surprised that the high court apparently ducked a ruling in the controversial case (U.S. vs. Hohri, 86-510). “This is a unique case, and you wonder, when you go this far, why they couldn’t settle it,” he said.

The high court, adopting an argument put forth by the Justice Department, said that this case should have been heard last year, not by the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, but by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. This specialized court was created by Congress in 1982 and given “exclusive appellate jurisdiction” over certain damage suits against the government.

Many Lost Property

In the months after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt authorized the military to remove Japanese-Americans from coastal areas in California, Oregon and Washington. Many of those citizens lost all their property and were forced to spend years in internment camps.

But the class-action suit belatedly seeking compensation for these actions has been tangled in procedural complexities since it was filed in 1983. A federal District Court dismissed the claims because the six-year statute of limitations on such suits had run out decades ago.

In his appeal to the District of Columbia circuit court, Zelenko contended that his suit should be exempted from that time limit because recently disclosed wartime memos cast a new light on the government’s actions at the time.

In 1943 and 1944, the Supreme Court upheld the mass denial of civil rights because it was a “military necessity.” This position had been put forth by government lawyers, although the FBI and other intelligence agencies had expressed doubts about the need for internment. Moreover, those doubts were deliberately concealed from the Supreme Court at the time, Zelenko said.

Part of Suit Reinstated

Last year, on a 6-5 vote, the District of Columbia circuit court reinstated the part of the suit seeking damages for lost property. It concluded that the time limit on such suits began ticking only after Congress conceded that the wartime internment was wrong in a 1980 resolution.

The Supreme Court Monday threw out that decision without even discussing its conclusion.

Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr., writing for the court, said that Congress wanted such claims decided by the specialized federal circuit court of appeals, not by a regional court based in Washington.

“It’s hard to imagine they (justices) took this case only to transfer it to another court,” said Los Angeles attorney Paul Hoffman, who filed a friend-of-the court brief for the American Civil Liberties Union and the Southern California ACLU chapter. “Maybe they were unable to come to a conclusion and took this as the easy way out.”

Positive Element Seen

Zelenko, the plaintiffs’ lawyer, saw one positive element in the decision. The District of Columbia circuit court had dismissed the claims seeking damages for civil rights violations, and the attorney said he will ask the court for the federal circuit to reinstate those charges against the government.

By one estimate, the plaintiffs say they are owed between $3.4 billion and $4.2 billion in compensation for lost property.

In other actions, the court:

--Allowed the U.S. Customs Service to resume drug-testing of employees seeking promotions. In this first appeal of President Reagan’s drug-testing program, the justices were asked to block the testing while the National Treasury Employees Union drafts a full appeal to the Supreme Court. Although denying a temporary stay, the court said nothing about the underlying issue. In April, an appeals court in New Orleans upheld the mandatory urine test, concluding that the government’s interest in a drug-free work place outweighs employees’ right to privacy (NTEU vs. Von Raab, 86-1879).

--Ruled that prison inmates have no right to exchange letters but that they do have a right to marry. On a 5-4 vote, the justices accepted Missouri’s contention that correspondence among prisoners can be dangerous because inmates can plan escapes and arrange attacks on guards or inmates who help authorities. But, on a 9-0 vote, the court concluded that restrictions on marriages are unwarranted (Turner vs. Safly, 85-1384).