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Volume 2 Number 2
SUPREME COURT AGREES TO HEAR JAPANESE.AMERICAN REDRESS CASE
The Supreme Court on November 17, 1986 agreed to review the decision of the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia in the Japanese American redress case, Hohri v. U.S. 782 F.2d 227 (D.C. Cir. 1986). The questions before the Court concern which federal appeals court has jurisdiction to hear the case; whether required procedures were followed in filing the case; and whether the case had been started after the statute of limitations had run out, thus barring consideration of the case on its merits. [A Japanese American Redress Bill has been introduced in Congress, see page 2.1
Background
On March 16, 1983 Japanese Americans who had been interned in U.S. military controlled camps during World War II brought a class action suit against the U.S. Government seeking monetary damages and a declaratory judgment on twenty-two claims based upon a variety of constitutional violations, wrongful acts, and other grounds. The district court dismissed the case in its entirety. The court held that all of the claims except one were barred by the fact that the United States was entitled to claim sovereign immunity from suit. The exception was a claim under the Takings Clause of the Constitution ("nor shall private property be taken for public use without just compensation" (Amendment V)) which could be considered by a federal district court under a federal statute called the Tucker Act which waives sovereign immunity. But the court ruled that this claim had been filed too late, and therefore dismissed it too. Other grounds for dismissal were that claims were not filed within the time required by law or be cause of the plaintiffs' failure to exhaust their administrative remedies as required, or because the court established that the U.S. had no fiduciary duty to the plaintiffs.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit affirmed in part, and reversed and remanded in part. The Court found the statutory and contract claims barred on various grounds. But the appellate court agreed with the plaintiffs that the six year statute of limitations on the Takings Clause claims had not elapsed "because the government fraudulently concealed essential elements of their cause of action [and] the statute of limitations was tolled (i.e. did not run) until they actually discovered the facts that had been concealed." The court found that on this one constitutional claim the government's concealment of the fact that there was no military necessity for the internment program was sufficient to suspend the statute of limitations, and that it did not begin to run until there was an "authoritative statement by one of the political branches" acknowledging that "there was reason to doubt the basis of the military necessity rationale." Such a statement, the court reasoned, occurred when the Congress passed in 1980 an Act creating the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians to review the evidence, and it was therefore then that the statute of limitations began to run. [The Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment concluded that the exclusion and detention of Japanese Americans during World liar II was based on racial prejudice, war hysteria and the lack of political leadership - not military necessity.]
The Department of Justice in its brief requesting Supreme Court review asserts that jurisdiction on appeal of the Takings Cause Claim was the exclusive province of a special court called the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, so that the D.C. Circuit should have ruled that it had no jurisdiction to consider the appeal to it.
  
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