<Begin Segment 5>

Q: With Gordon Hirabayashi, could you kind of describe the statement that he had written, and why he wrote it...

Q2: Just sort of starting with that and going through the process.

Q: Yeah, going up through the rest of the levels.

PI: When Gordon decided that he would challenge the evacuation, he prepared for it by writing a statement. about a four-page statement: "Why I am refusing to report for evacuation." It's a very interesting statement, because it put in his own words his moral objections, reference to his constitutional rights, why he felt that the government had no right to force him into a camp. He prepared this with a lawyer who was a friend of his, a member of the Quaker meeting in Seattle, Arthur Barnett. And they put it together and then went to the FBI. Gordon called the FBI, said he was gonna turn himself in, and he went there, presented them with the statement. They first tried to talk him out of it. They took him to the evacuation center, asked him to sign the forms and go to the camp. He refused to do that. Then they decided to bring a charge against him for violating the evacuation order. But they discovered when he was in the FBI office, an agent went through his briefcase and found the diary that he'd been keeping during this whole period in which Gordon had admitted violating the curfew. He said, "I went out past the forbidden line tonight, it felt very strange. I got a lift out of beating the silly curfew." So they added another charge against him.

[Interruption]

PI: When Gordon first got arrested, turned himself in, he was represented by Art Barnett, who was a young lawyer, felt he didn't have a great deal of experience in constitutional cases, so they recruited an older, more experienced lawyer who they thought would be able to communicate with the judge. The judge in that case, Judge Black, was a very conservative former prosecutor who had already ruled in an earlier case of a woman who attempted to challenge the curfew that Japanese were disloyal by nature. He was, I think, clearly prejudiced against Gordon, and they felt that a more conservative lawyer would have a better chance with that judge. But when the case went to trial, they found first of all that the judge was even more adamant about Gordon's case. He felt that it was disloyal to even challenge the evacuation or the curfew. The jury was composed entirely of elderly retired people, most of them American Legion members. The trial was very short. Gordon testified on his own behalf and he had character witnesses, but it was all a foregone conclusion. The judge instructed the jury to find him guilty. Said, "Based on his admission that he violated the curfew, did not report to evacuation, you have no other choice but to find him guilty." Now, that was a violation of legal rules. The judge isn't entitled to do that, but he got away with it. The jury took ten minutes to convict him.

Q: Do you want to go on further on to the appeals? Can you tell us about his appeal process and what happened?

PI: Well, after Gordon was convicted, his case was appealed along with Fred's and Min's to the Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco. All those cases were argued together. The government lawyer who argued before the court was Edward Ennis of the Justice Department in Washington, who personally was opposed to the evacuation. He felt that it was unconstitutional, but he felt an obligation to present the case to the court. He did so without really using inflammatory language, although one of the other government lawyers did say, "There's a danger of this invasion, Japanese can't be distinguished from enemy soldiers," but the court in that case, on the appeal, really felt that these were questions that were so important that they would rather defer them to the Supreme Court. So what they did, rather than deciding the cases, was simply kick them up to the Supreme Court by submitting a list of questions that they wanted the Supreme Court to answer. The Supreme Court then decided rather than answer these constitutional questions, they would decide the cases themselves.

<End Segment 5> - Copyright © 1983, 2010 Densho and Steven Okazaki. All Rights Reserved.