Saturday, March 29, 2014

U.S. bypasses Korematsu plea : SCOTUSblog



My fellow student of Howard Zinn - Peter Irons - has waged a long campaign to erase the stain of the WWII Japanese incarcerations from our jurisprudence. He and others who represented Fred Korematsu and Gordon Hirabayashi gave it one more try in Hedges v. Obama as Adam Liptak recently reported in the Times. Hedges and other dissenting writers have often reported matters from "the other side".  Fearing that extensive contacts with `the enemy'  could be understood as support the writers challenged the statute embracing the principles of the post 9/11 authorization for the use of force.  - gwc
U.S. bypasses Korematsu plea (UPDATED) : SCOTUSblog:
by Lyle Denniston

The Obama administration, urging the Supreme Court to turn aside a new challenge to presidential power to detain individuals suspected of terrorism links, chose not to support a years-long campaign to get the Court to repudiate one of its most heavily criticized opinions from the World War II era.
In a brief filed this week in Hedges v. Obama (docket 13-758), the U.S. Solicitor General’s office said nothing about the 1944 ruling in Korematsu v. United States – a decision that upheld the conviction of a Japanese American for refusing to go to a wartime detention camp.

In January, government lawyers had been urged to use their reply to the Hedges petition to try to persuade the Court either to overrule outright the Korematsu decision, or at least to tell the Court that the government did not regard that precedent as support for any current detention authority.

The brief, filed Wednesday, did neither, focusing its argument mainly on the point that the individuals who filed the challenge — journalists, authors and political activists — did not have a right to sue because they actually were not threatened with detention and thus could not claim legal injury.
'via Blog this'

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