New Setback for Internees

Sometimes the law works against justice.

Shortly after the bombing of Pearl Harbor more than 45 years ago, about 120,000 Japanese-Americans living on the West Coast of the United States were declared dangerous to the country and were rounded up and interned. At the time, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld this wholesale violation of basic civil liberties as necessary for the war effort.

More recently, however, virtually everyone in this country--including the Supreme Court--has come to realize what a terrible injustice was done to these people, many of whom lost all their property and were kept in concentration camps for years even though they had done nothing wrong and had no intention of doing anything wrong. In 1976 President Gerald R. Ford declared the World War II internment “a sad day in American history,” and in 1983 a congressional commission recommended that each surviving internee be paid $20,000. But so far Congress has not acted, and no compensation has been paid.

In the meantime, the Supreme Court has reheard the wartime internment cases--which involved three Japanese-Americans who refused to be evacuated--and, in an extraordinary step, reversed its judgment, declaring that the government lied about the need to round these people up. Still, however, no compensation has been paid.

The court had the opportunity this week to straighten out this disgraceful episode, but, for reasons that only the justices know, it ducked the chance. A class-action suit filed on behalf of the 60,000 survivors of the internment (United States vs. Hohri, No. 86-510) had reached the court, but the justices barely looked at the merits of the case and instead sent it back to a lower court on jurisdictional grounds. The case should have been heard by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, the justices said, rather than the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

Every delay in this case compounds the injustice. After the case is heard by the proper appeals court, it will no doubt return to the Supreme Court intwo or three years, by which time fewer of these elderly people will still be alive. They have been waiting 45 years for justice. Why should they have to wait longer?

The court will have to face the basic issue some day. It could have faced it now. “Justice delayed is justice denied” is a well-known aphorism. Or, as Charles Dickens wrote, “The law is a ass.”