<Begin Segment 22>

MC: Can you tell us a little bit about this group, the Bay Area Attorneys for Redress?

DM: Yeah, this was... when the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians was created to investigate the causes of the incarceration of Japanese Americans and make recommendations, some of us thought, had an idea. We... and I can't tell you who generated it because we worked so collectively I can't, we used each other's words in speeches so I can't even attribute. But we thought what if we, we ought to put together... and this comes from the Kore-, reading the Korematsu case early on. That's the genesis for sure, in constitutional law. Because in my mind, hell, the first ten amendments, you know, the Bill of Rights, so many of those provisions were violated when the Japanese Americans were taken away. So we all, we had this idea, let's send a brief to the commission. Arguing what Bill of Rights were violated when Japanese Americans were taken away, how their constitutional rights were taken away. So we went through the Constitution laboriously and -- we assembled a group. People volunteered, people heard about us, a number of people came and they made a incredible number of suggestions about how we should be doing things and when we assigned them to do it they dropped out. So then you got, you knew who was bullshitting and who was not. We got a small group together and we went through the amendments. First amendment, yeah, it was violated right to assembly, right to petition the government for grievances. Fourth amendment, right to unreasonable searches and seizures. Sixth amendment, right to a trial, due process, and the fifth, cruel and unusual punishment. I mean, you could just go right down the thing and it's... whoa, it even blew our minds. So we did this brief and we sent one of our people, one of the group members to D.C. to present that in front of the commission. In fact, that's I think how Peter Irons first heard of us.

MC: Oh, that's interesting. So, between the beginning of your law practice and the time when you started this group, the BAAR, were you involved at all with the growing movement for reparations?

DM: Um...

MC: I mean, you had mentioned earlier that you had --

DM: No. I mean here's... let me think if I can remember this. In '72 I was with, helped with Bay Area JACL and then in '74 we wrote the memo on legislative means, went to Seattle or Portland, one of those two places, the national convention presented it. But then I'll tell you. I'll tell you what happened. I was watching this from afar. We were always presenting the resolutions and I was so busy trying to make a living at that time I paid less attention to that, or I was less active. I paid attention, I was watching what was going on. But you know, truthfully, I wasn't really very optimistic that you could ever get reparations from this country. And then, a representative from Washington sent in, put in a bill for the national NCJAR. A bill that was, was, people testified and didn't even get out of committee. But it started creating a little bit more of a buzz. People were getting restless at that time. And so when the commission started occurring, that's when we started getting involved. I think that was --

MC: And that was about the early '80s?

DM: Late '70's, early '80s, yeah.

TI: And that was Mike Lowry from the --

DM: Mike Lowry, that's who it was. He was crazy. And that was great, though. It was great. And that did get a lot of attention. That was the first bill that went in. And people were, "Oh, that'll never pass." But then it got attention so it was using law in a very educational way, which I really liked. And I thought, "Oh, this is pretty cool." And so it started getting my interest. I followed it more and more and more. And that's why when the commission got formed we got this idea of putting the brief in.

TI: But what I'm curious, too, is, so you were at the, I'm jumping back a little bit, but the Asian Law Caucus, and then the formation of your own firm.

DM: Right.

TI: I mean, so what was the connection, or how did that transition --

DM: Well, at the Caucus, I was there from '71 to '74. And the theory was to let new lawyers come in to practice community law. We should move on. It was a revolving door theory. Since that time I think that theory's been revised. It wasn't a good theory because lawyers didn't have time to get competent. Excuse me. So in '75 we left to form our own firm. Some of the originators of the Caucus. And so we started taking, just in private practice, doing whatever we could to make a living and doing a lot of criminal defense, is what we did. And then, then we got into much, as we got bigger, we did other things. So between that time, from '75 to probably 1980, what I was doing... let's see, when was that? Yeah, from'75 to '80 we were doing a number of different cases locally. We represented Wendy Yoshimura who was caught with the Symbionese Liberation Army, defending her. We did a number of political-type cases with the International Hotel that was being razed to create luxury condos that never came up. And then in '76, I think it was '76 I got a call from Denny Yasuhara, Spokane JACL, to ask me to sue Washington State for failure to have an Asian American Studies program. So we did a class-action at that time. That led to the coram nobis cases. So we were still doing much political law at that time.

<End Segment 22> - Copyright © 2003 Densho. All Rights Reserved.