Interviews
Bypassing the Constitution
His, his instructions—you know, the jury is told what to do by the judge. And so in my situation, the judge says, "You heard all this discussion about the Constitution and all that. That's irrelevant. Whatever the Constitution says, the thing that you must take into consideration is this Executive Order 9066 issued by the general in charge." And he reads it out. "Now, you're to determine to what extent this applied. Is this person of Japanese ancestry? If he is, did he comply with these restrictions? If he didn't, you must come back with a guilty verdict. If he did, then he's not guilty." They went in.
It didn't take them too long. As jury, they probably just took enough time to settle down and then review this, these things, instructions and so on, and say it's pretty cut-and-dried, isn't it? Why don't we take a vote on it before wasting too much time? Because they came out fairly rapidly. And, and then the verdict was guilty. And the judge asked, "Is this the way you all felt unanimously?" "Yep." And so that was it.
Date: December 5, 1999
Location: Washington, US
Interviewer: Tom Ikeda, Alice Ito
Contributed by: Denshō: The Japanese American Legacy Project.
