Toyosaburo "Fred" Korematsu was the unsuccessful appellant in the Japanese interment case,
Korematsu v. United States, 323 U.S. 214 (1944).
The case began when Korematsu was convicted of refusing to leave San Leandro, California, a military area from which ethnic Japanese were excluded. His appeal went to the Supreme Court which, by a 6-3 vote, upheld his conviction.
Justice Hugo Black, who wrote the majority opinion, dodged the real issue--the forcible relocation and detention of thousands of Japanese Americans--by focusing only on the constitutionality of excluding them from large portions of the West Coast:
"Regardless of the true nature of the assembly and relocation centers--and we deem it unjustifiable to call them concentration camps with all the ugly connotations that term implies--we are dealing specifically with nothing but an exclusion order."
Black concluded that while restrictions aimed at a single racial group deserved "the most rigid scrutiny," the wartime exclusion of ethnic Japanese from a threatened area had "a definite and close relationship to the prevention of espionage and sabotage."
And even though the tide of the war had turned in America's favor since Korematsu's arrest, Justice Black refused to second-guess the military's original determination that there were disloyal Japanese who on the West Coast who needed to be excluded. This decision bears part of the blame for the Administration's wide-ranging and arrogant stance regarding the scope of the Executive's war powres.
The three dissenters condemned the unequal treatment of ethnic Japanese. Justice Owen Roberts also accused the majority of avoiding the real issue: Forcing people into camps solely because of their ancestry and without evidence they were disloyal.
Justice Frank Murphy questioned the military's contention that their relocation was necessary to prevent sabotage.
And Justice Robert Jackson, who would later take part in the Nuremburg war crimes trials, argued that the Court had made a mistake by deciding the constitutionality of the President's military orders in the first place. In his view, it would have been better to let the voters, not the courts, serve as the ultimate check on the President's exercise of his war powers.
Historians--as opposed to Michelle Malkin--consider the Japanese internment one of the more shameful episodes in American legal history. In 1983, a federal commission issued a report, Personal Justice Denied, which concluded that the internment was not justified by military necessity and that the Supreme Court decisions upholding it were "overruled in the court of history."
A footnote: In 1984, U.S. District Judge Marilyn Patel issued an order vacating Korematsu's conviction. In doing so, she concluded that the claim of military necessity for President Roosevelt's order was based on "unsubstantiated facts, distortions and representations of at least one military commander, whose views were seriously infected by racism."
Another footnote: Korematsu filed a friend-of-the-court brief in the Guantanamo detainee case, Rasul v. Bush.