At 09:12 PM 11/7/96 -0800, Peter Hendrickson wrote:
Fred Korematsu was a Japanese-American shipyard worker in the early 1940s. His fiancee was Caucasian. To stay with her, he evaded the concentration camps for two months, but was caught and convicted anyway. His conviction was not reversed until 1983 in the court of one Judge Patel.
Page 48, "After hearing lawyers on both sides, Judge Marilyn Patel asked Fred Korematsu to address the court. `As long as my record stands in federal court,' he quietly stated, `any American citizen can be held in prison or concentration camps without a trial or hearing.' Ruling from the bench, Judge Patel labeled the government's position as `tantamount to a confession of error' and erased Fred's conviction from the court's records."
(Judge Patel is presiding over Dan Bernstein's challenge to the ITAR.)
However, the fact that it took 40 years to reverse (and didn't, presumably, reverse the convictions of others, and didn't compensate people for lost property) is yet another reason to take a few pieces out of the hide of the SC, as well as a few pounds of flesh nearest the heart. Jim Bell jimbell@pacifier.com