Acheson v. Murakami, 12082.
| Decision Date | 26 August 1949 |
| Docket Number | No. 12082.,12082. |
| Parties | ACHESON, Secretary of State v. MURAKAMI et al. |
| Court | U.S. Court of Appeals — Ninth Circuit |
H. G. Morison, Asst. Atty. Gen., James M. Carter, U. S. Atty., Ernest A. Tolin, Asst. U. S. Atty., Los Angeles, Cal., Enoch E. Ellison, Sp. Asst. to Atty. Gen., Bonnell Phillips and Paul J. Grumbly, Attys. Dept. of Justice, Washington, D. C., for appellant.
A. L. Wirin and Fred Okrand, Los Angeles, Cal. (Nanette Dembitz, Arthur Garfield Hays and Osmond K. Fraenkel, New York City, Frank F. Chuman, Los Angeles, Cal., of counsel), for appellees.
Before DENMAN, Chief Judge, and STEPHENS and ORR, Circuit Judges.
The Secretary of State appeals from a judgment cancelling the renunciations of citizenship by appellees, American born of Japanese descent, made while incarcerated at Tule Lake. The district court found that the renunciations were "not as a result of their free and intelligent choice but rather because of mental fear, intimidation and coercions depriving them of the free exercise of their will, and said purported renunciations are void and of no force or effect."
The complaint alleged that appellees, at dates in and between December, 1944, and March, 1945, applied to renounce their citizenship under the provisions of Section 401 of the Nationality Act of 1940, as amended, 8 U.S.C.A. § 801(i), and that the applications were granted; that the renunciations were null and void and should be cancelled for the reasons found by the court; that in 1948 they duly applied for passports and that officers of the State Department had refused to issue passports to them on the sole ground that appellees were no longer citizens or nationals of the United States by reason of the aforesaid renunciations of United States nationality. The court had jurisdiction under 8 U.S.C.A. § 903 (R.3). The answer raised as the sole issue the existence of mental fear, intimidation and coercion as the cause of the renunciations.
The findings of probative facts of District Judge Mathes vividly showing the conditions prevailing at Tule Lake Center are contained in Exhibit (1) attached to and made a part of this opinion. We agree that each of these findings is supported by the evidence.
Underlying all the particular factors so found as leading to a condition of mind and spirit of the American citizens imprisoned at Tule Lake Center, which make the renunciations of citizenship not the free and intelligent choice of appellees, is the unnecessarily cruel and inhuman treatment of these citizens (a) in the manner of their deportation for imprisonment1 and (b) in their incarceration for over two and a half years under conditions in major respects as degrading as those of a penitentiary and in important respects worse than in any federal penitentiary, and (c) in applying to them the Nazi-like doctrine of inherited racial enmity, stated by the Commanding General ordering the deportations as the major reason for that action.
Since the records of this court show the government is contesting some four thousand similar cases of deportees who are seeking identical relief, we are giving consideration to these uncontested underlying facts, certain to have their effect upon the minds of the mass of deportees incarcerated at Tule Lake.
In considering the effect of the government's treatment on the minds of our deported fellow citizens, those litigating here and many others found to be loyal Americans, it must be remembered how highly educated are the Nisei, the 70,000 native born Japanese. According to the Army's statistical division, Bulletin 11 of March 15, 1943, the educational level of the Nisei exceeded that of the native whites of native parentage in the four Western States. It is not surprising that such eminent educators as Robert Gordon Sproul, President of the University of California, protested the Nisei deportations and the De Witt doctrine of inherited racial enmity, later discussed.
A. The racial deportation. Its unnecessary hardships and cruelty as affecting the attitude of scores of thousands of loyal Americans towards their citizenship in a country so ordering them into imprisonment.
Typical of the deportation orders under which the citizen prisoners of the Tule Lake Center were ordered from their homes to their first barbed wire guarded stockades, euphemistically called Assembly Centers, is Civilian Exclusion Order No. 34 of Major General De Witt of Sunday, May 3, 1942. This required them to be so incarcerated not later than noon of Saturday, May 9, 1942.
What these citizens, their families in a single group, and individual men, women and children and babies were commanded to do in this brief period, less than five days to those not receiving the notice before Monday noon, is as follows:
One has no difficulty imagining the thousands of families in which the mother must carry the babies, measuring the carrying capacity of each of the other children able to walk against the sacrifice of one or another household utensil, or book, or family treasure.
The emotion of free citizens contemplating the pathetic testing of the carrying capacity of stumbling infants lifting their bundles is not pertinent here. What is pertinent is what our incarcerated fellow citizens felt about it in their several years behind barbed wire under the machine guns of the soldiers in their prison's turrets. For, so far as concerns the psychology of the renunciations to those renouncing and their surrounding companions, the beguiling words "evacuation" meant deportation, "evacuees" meant prisoners, "relocation center" meant prison and their single rooms, some crowding in six persons, meant cells, as they in fact were. Their true character is recognized in this opinion.
The stowage of the remainder of the family possessions, it will be noted, is "at the sole risk of the owner." So also it was of the stock in trade of thousands of small merchants, the agricultural tools of the thousands of farmers, the professional books and instruments of lawyers and doctors. For many no storage places were provided by General De Witt, though it is apparent that two months earlier he contemplated the deportation. It is obvious that storage warehouses available for all such properties of the 110,000-odd deportees did not exist.
The inevitable followed, after the meaning of the De Witt orders was understood. Unscrupulous secondhand dealers bought family possessions for a song. One can picture a widow bargaining for the family bedstead and kitchen stove while measuring the carrying capacity and load of her infants. Nor can one fail to apprehend the bitter sense of frustration of a doctor or lawyer at the loss of a long built up practice or that of the farmer trying to sell his partially matured crop, the result of years of soil improvement, to avid buyers who know the seller is but two or three days from his stockade.
Finally, one has no difficulty in realizing the repeated recitals of such wrongs in the crowded dust filled halls and cells of the Tule Lake Center and their effect upon the psychology of those there contemplating the value of an American citizenship.
B. The incarceration at the Tule Lake stockade. Its effect upon the minds of our fellow citizens as to the value of their citizenship.
The barbed wire stockade surrounding the 18,000 people there was like that of the prison camps of the Germans. There were the same turrets for the soldiers and the same machine guns for those who might attempt to climb the high wiring. How closely packed they were is shown by the following photograph of the United States Army Signal Corps in evidence.
The armed turrets are the spots which appear at the two lower corners and elsewhere on the surrounding stockade, though faintly appearing in upper portion of the reproduction. The imprisoning buildings shown were constructed in part by the citizens who were to occupy them, alongside free carpenters, painters and plumbers. As if to drive it in to their already shocked spirits that their treatment was to be like criminals in a penitentiary, they were paid the prison wage of $12 a month to the unskilled and $16 to those skilled, while their free fellow citizens, working beside...
To continue reading
Request your trial
-
Tomoya Kawakita v. United States
...Act of 1940 have been held not to have such effect where the element of duress or lack of free choice existed. In Acheson v. Murakami, 9 Cir., 1949, 176 F.2d 953, we upheld a judgment cancelling the renunciation of citizenship by American born persons of Japanese descent, made while they we......
-
Jolley v. Immigration and Naturalization Service
...election motivated by fear of loss of ration cards involuntary and not expatriating under 8 U.S.C.A. § 1481(a) (5); Acheson v. Murakami, 9 Cir. 1949, 176 F.2d 953; Inouye v. Clark, S.D.Cal. 1947, 73 F.Supp. 1000, rev'd on other grounds, 9 Cir. 1949, 175 F.2d 740 decisions to renounce United......
-
Hichino Uyeno v. Acheson
...to prove the act to be involuntary, the conclusion would be unavoidable that there was none. But our Court of Appeals in Acheson v. Murakami, 9 Cir., 1949, 176 F.2d 953, and other courts have held that there may be a type of public coercion which renders an act involuntary, although it does......
-
Voluntariness of Renunciations of Citizenship Under 8 U.S.C. §1481(a)(6)
...bears little factual resemblance to the circumstances surrounding Mr. A's and Mr. B'' renunciations, and therefore we believe the Acheson holding is of limited precedential value [21]Nishikawa and most of the other cases cited above were decided prior to 1961, when Congress amended § 1481 t......