MEDIA
Error Before Us: The Coram Nobis Cases Movie
In October 2023, the Fred T. Korematsu Institute commemorated the 40th anniversary of the coram nobis cases of Fred Korematsu, Gordon Hirabayashi, and Minoru Yasui in San Francisco. Watch the short film, honoring the coram nobis team members and the case.
Summary of the Coram Nobis Cases:
Thirty-seven years after the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the mass incarceration, secret Justice Department, Naval, FBI, and FCC intelligence reports surfaced, characterizing the Army’s claims that Japanese Americans were spying as “intentional falsehoods,” and admitting that Japanese Americans had committed no wrong and posed no threat. Despite whistleblowers urging the Solicitor General and the Attorney General that the Justice Department had a duty to disclose this evidence and not to lie to the Court, the evidence was altered, suppressed, and in one instance burned, in order to manipulate the outcome of these landmark decisions.
In 1983, the coram nobis petitions on behalf of Fred Korematsu, Gordon Hirabayashi, and Minoru Yasui laid bare this fraud on the Court and resulted in the overturning of their criminal convictions. These landmark legal battles vindicated Japanese Americans and boosted their reparations movement by revealing not only that the mass racial round-up was wrong, but that the government knew it at the time.
- summary by Minami Tamaki LLC
PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT
"What would you do?"
The Korematsu Institute PSA Wins a Telly Award
"OF CIVIL WRONGS AND RIGHTS"
TWO TIME EMMY AWARD WINNING DOCUMENTARY TRAILER (3 MINS.)
Broadcast during the 2001 season of P.O.V., Eric Paul Fournier’s OF CIVIL WRONGS AND RIGHTS won Emmys at the 23rd Annual News & Documentary Emmy Awards: Outstanding Individual Achievement in a Craft Direction and Outstanding Individual Achievement in a Craft Editing.
Fred Korematsu was probably never more American than when he resisted, and then challenged in court, the forced internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. Korematsu lost his landmark Supreme Court case in 1944, but never his indignation and resolve. OF CIVIL WRONGS AND RIGHTS is the untold history of the 40-year legal fight to vindicate Korematsu one that finally turned a civil injustice into a civil rights victory.