Jack Herzig, 83; Lawyer Helped Gain Redress for Internees

Jack Herzig, a lawyer who, with his wife, helped gain redress from the United States for the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, has died of colon cancer. He was 83.

Herzig, a World War II veteran, died Sunday at his Gardena home, his son-in-law, Warren Furutani, said.

From 1942 to 1945, the federal government interned more than 120,000 ethnic Japanese, most of whom were born in the United States.

The U.S. Supreme Court, ruling in the 1944 case of Fred Y. Korematsu, upheld the constitutionality of imprisoning Japanese Americans during the war. Korematsu, who in 1942 was a 23-year-old welder living in Oakland, refused to report to an internment camp. He was arrested, convicted of violating the internment order and sent to a camp in Utah.

In the 1980s, Herzig aided his wife, Aiko Yoshinaga-Herzig, in uncovering documents in the National Archives and other repositories showing that government prosecutors suppressed, altered and destroyed evidence during the case against Korematsu. The documents enabled a team of attorneys, largely Asian Americans, to file a petition for writ of coram nobis, a rarely used legal strategy to overturn convictions after new evidence is discovered.

In 2003, a federal judge exonerated Korematsu and denounced the government for having based its decisions on “unsubstantiated facts, distortions and the [opinions] of one military commander whose views were seriously tainted by racism.”

The ruling helped secure a presidential apology and financial reparations for former internees.