Coram Nobis and the Continuum of Activism

              Heritage* Spring 1999
Right: Fred Korematsu with his redress
check and letter of apology.
By permission of photographer.
Coram Nobis:
The Error Before Us
By Kenji Murase, PhD
Coram Nobis is a Latin term meaning the "error before us." A
petition for a "writ of error
Coram Nobis" is a legal procedure designed to protect criminal defendants
against arbitrary and unlawful judicial
action. Related to the better known
writ of habeas corpus which protects
against unlawful detention, Coram
Nobis applies to persons who have been
convicted and have served their sentence.
Coram Nobis is limited to cases in
which a "fundamental error" or "manifest injustice" has been committed. A
high burden of proof is required. It
cannot be used to reopen and reargue
points of law the courts have decided,
but only to raise errors of fact that were
knowingly withheld by the prosecutor
from judges and defendants. Clearly,
only defendants who can demonstrate
the most outrageous and obvious governmental or prosecutorial misconduct would have any chance of
winning in a Coram Nobis case.
In January 1983 a legal team led by
Dale Minami and Peter Irons filed a
Coram Nobis petition in the San
Francisco federal district court on behalf of Fred Korematsu. Simultaneously, almost identical petitions
were filed in Seattle on behalf of
Gordon Hirabayashi, and in Portland
on behalf of Minoru Yasui. The petitions argued that the 1943 and 1944
Supreme Court decisions in
their cases, affirming the constitutionality of the World War
II curfew and exclusion orders
and upholding their convictions for violating the orders,
were compromised by fundamental errors and manifest
injustice on the part of the
government. They charged
that the government had withheld from the Supreme Court
information about alteration, suppression and destruction of relevant
evidence; e.g., knowledge of the falsity
of General DeWitt's allegations of espionage and sabotage by Japanese
Americans, his racist view that inherent racial characteristics made it
impossible to separate the disloyal
from the loyal, and that military necessity justified the mass removal and
incarceration of Japanese Americans.
The significance of the Coram Nobis
petitions is that they coincided with a
growing movement among Japanese
Americans for some form of redress
and reparations for the injustice of internment. By challenging the
convictions of Hirabayashi, Korematsu
and Yasui for violations of the curfew
and exclusion orders, the petitions attacked the underlying legality of the
exclusion and incarceration. By
demonstrating that the Supreme
Court's convictions and the upholding
of the constitutionality of the exclusion
and detention order were tainted by
fraud and misconduct by the government, the petitions discredited the
court's rulings and legitimized the call
for redress and reparations.
Given the overwhelming odds
against them, the victory of the Coram
Nobis legal teams was a remarkable
achievement. Historically, never before
in American legal history had a comparable effort been mounted to overturn
convictions in cases that had been finally decided by the Supreme Court.
The following account summarizes in a
time-line the history and context of the
Coram Nobis cases in which Sansei
lawyers and their associates succeeded
in exposing the government's premeditated and calculated lies to the
Supreme Court in order to manipulate
the outcome of its ruling on the legality of the exclusion and internment
orders. ■
4    National Japanese American Historical Society