What was ex parte endo

Order No. She filed a petition for habeas corpus asking that she be discharged and restored to liberty, which was denied by the court.

The case was appealed to the Supreme Court of the United States. The Supreme Court held that that whatever power the War Relocation Authority may have had to detain classes of citizens, pursuant to Exec. Her petition for a writ of habeas corpus alleges that she is a loyal and law-abiding citizen of the United States, that no charge has been made against her, that she is being unlawfully detained, and that she is confined in the Relocation Center under armed guard and held there against her will….

We are of the view that Mitsuye Endo should be given her liberty. In reaching that conclusion, we do not come to the underlying constitutional issues which have been argued. For we conclude that, whatever power the War Relocation Authority may have to detain other classes of citizens, it has no authority to subject citizens who are concededly loyal to its leave procedure….

Discussion Questions Why did the court find that Japanese citizens could be released from war-time detention? It is conceded that appellant's detention pending compliance with the leave regulations is not directly connected with the prevention of espionage and sabotage at the present time.

But it is argued that Executive Order No. The leave regulations are said to fall within that category. We are of the view that Mitsuye Endo should be given her liberty.

In reaching that conclusion we do not come to the underlying constitutional issues which have been argued. For we conclude that, whatever power the War Relocation Authority may have to detain other classes of citizens, it has no authority to subject citizens who are concededly loyal to its leave procedure.

It should be noted at the outset that we do not have here a question such as was presented in Ex parte Milligan, 4 Wall. Mitsuye Endo is detained by a civilian agency, the War Relocation Authority, not by the military. Moreover, the evacuation program was not left exclusively to the military; the Authority was given a large measure of responsibility for its execution and Congress made its enforcement subject to civil penalties by the Act of March 21, Accordingly, no questions of military law are involved.

Such power of detention as the Authority has stems from Executive Order No. That order is the source of the authority 20 delegated by General De Witt in his letter of August 11, And Executive Order No. We approach the construction of Executive Order No. That Executive Order must indeed be considered along with the Act of March 21, , which ratified and confirmed it Kiyoshi Hirabayashi v.

United States, supra, U. Broad powers frequently granted to the President or other executive officers by Congress so that they may deal with the exigencies of war time problems have been sustained.

Kiyoshi Hirabayashi v. At the same time, however, the Constitution is as specific in its enumeration of many of the civil rights of the individual as it is in its enumeration of the powers of his government.

Thus it has prescribed procedural safeguards surrounding the arrest, detention and conviction of individuals. Some of these are contained in the Sixth Amendment , compliance with which is essential if convictions are to be sustained. Tot v. And the Fifth Amendment provides that no person shall be deprived of liberty as well as life or property without due process of law.

Moreover, as a further safeguard against invasion of the basic civil rights of the individual it is provided in Art. I, Sec. We mention these constitutional provisions not to stir the constitutional issues which have been argued at the bar but to indicate the approach which we think should be made to an Act of Congress or an order of the Chief Executive that touches the sensitive area of rights specifically guaranteed by the Constitution.

This Court has quite consistently given a narrower scope for the operation of the presumption of constitutionality when legislation appeared on its face to violate a specific prohibition of the Constitution.

We must assume that the Chief Executive and members of Congress, as well as the courts, are sensitive to and respectful of the liberties of the citizen.

In interpreting a war-time measure we must assume that their purpose was to allow for the greatest possible accommodation between those liberties and the exigencies of war. We must assume, when asked to find implied powers in a grant of legislative or executive authority, that the law makers intended to place no greater restraint on the citizen than was clearly and unmistakably indicated by the language they used.

The Act of March 21, , was a war measure. The House Report H. Their single aim was the protection of the war effort against espionage and sabotage. It is in light of that one objective that the powers conferred by the orders must be construed. Neither the Act nor the orders use the language of detention.

The Act says that no one shall 'enter, remain in leave, or commit any act' in the prescribed military areas contrary to the applicable restrictions. Executive Order No. And apart from those restrictions the Secretary of War is only given authority to afford the evacuees 'transportation, food, shelter, and other accommodations. United States, supra , the legislative history of the Act of March 21, , is silent on detention. And that silence may have special significance in view of the fact that detention in Relocation Centers was no part of the original program of evacuation but developed later to meet what seemed to the officials in charge to be mounting hostility to the evacuees on the part of the communities where they sought to go.

We do not mean to imply that detention in connection with no phase of the evacuation program would be lawful. The fact that the Act and the orders are silent on detention does not of course mean that any power to detain is lacking. Some such power might indeed be necessary to the successful operation of the evacuation program. At least we may so assume.

Moreover, we may assume for the purposes of this case that initial detention in Relocation Centers was authorized.

But we stress the silence of the legislative history and of the Act and the Executive Orders on the power to detain to emphasize that any such authority which exists must be implied. If there is to be the greatest possible accommodation of the liberties of the citizen with this war measure, any such implied power must be narrowly confined to the precise purpose of the evacuation program.

A citizen who is concededly loyal presents no problem of espionage or sabotage. Loyalty is a matter of the heart and mind not of race, creed, or color. He who is loyal is by definition not a spy or a saboteur. When the power to detain is derived from the power to protect the war effort against espionage and sabotage, detention which has no relationship to that objective is unauthorized. Nor may the power to detain an admittedly loyal citizen or to grant him a conditional release be implied as a useful or convenient step in the evacuation program, whatever authority might be implied in case of those whose loyalty was not conceded or established.

If we assume as we do that the original evacuation was justified, its lawful character was derived from the fact that it was an espionage and sabotage measure, not that there was community hostility to this group of American citizens. The evacuation program rested explicitly on the former ground not on the latter as the underlying legislation shows. The authority to detain a citizen or to grant him a conditional release as protection against espionage or sabotage is exhausted at least when his loyalty is conceded.

If we held that the authority to detain continued thereafter, we would transform an espionage or sabotage measure into something else. That was not done by Executive Order No. What they did not do we cannot do. Detention which furthered the campaign against espionage and sabotage would be one thing.

But detention which has no relationship to that campaign is of a distinct character. Community hostility even to loyal evacuees may have been and perhaps still is a serious problem.

But if authority for their custody and supervision is to be sought on that ground, the Act of March 21, , Executive Order No. And none other is advanced. We cannot make such an assumption. As the President has said of these loyal citizens: 'Americans of Japanese ancestry, like those of many other ancestries, have shown that they can, and want to, accept our institutions and work loyally with the rest of us, making their own valuable contribution to the national wealth and well-being.

In vindication of the very ideals for which we are fighting this war it is important to us to maintain a high standard of fair, considerate, and equal treatment for the people of this minority as of all other minorities.

Mitsuye Endo is entitled to an unconditional release by the War Relocation Authority. The question remains whether the District Court has jurisdiction to grant the writ of habeas corpus because of the fact that while the case was pending in the Circuit Court of Appeals appellant was moved from the Tule Lake Relocation Center in the Northern District of California where she was originally detained to the Central Utah Relocation Center in a different district and circuit.

That question is not colored by any purpose to effectuate a removal in evasion of the habeas corpus proceedings. It appears that appellant's removal to Utah was part of a general segregation program involving many of these people and was in no way related to this pending case. Moreover, there is no suggestion that there is no one within the jurisdiction of the District Court who is responsible for the detention of appellant and who would be an appropriate respondent.

We are indeed advised by the Acting Secretary of the Interior 25 that if the writ issues and is directed to the Secretary of the Interior or any official of the War Relocation Authority including an assistant director whose office is at San Francisco, which is in the jurisdiction of the District Court , the corpus of appellant will be produced and the court's order complied with in all respects. Thus it would seem that the case is not moot.

In United States ex rel. Innes v. Crystal, U. After that decision and before his petition for certiorari was filed here, he was removed from the custody of the Army to a federal penitentiary in a different district and circuit.

The sole respondent was the commanding officer. Only an order directed to the warden of the penitentiary could effectuate his discharge and the warden as well as the prisoner was outside the territorial jurisdiction of the District Court. We therefore held the cause moot. There is no comparable situation here. The fact that no respondent was ever served with process or appeared in the proceedings is not important.

The United States resists the issuance of a writ. A cause exists in that state of the proceedings and an appeal lies from denial of a writ without the appearance of a respondent. Ex parte Milligan, supra, 4 Wall. Hence, so far as presently appears, the cause is not moot and the District Court has jurisdiction to act unless the physical presence of appellant in that district is essential.

We need not decide whether the presence of the person detained within the territorial jurisdiction of the District Court is prerequisite to filing a petition for a writ of habeas corpus. See In re Boles, 8 Cir.

Day, 3 Cir. Schlotfeldt, 7 Cir. But see Tippitt v. Wood, 70 U. We only hold that the District Court acquired jurisdiction in this case and that the removal of Mitsuye Endo did not cause it to lose jurisdiction where a person in whose custody she is remains within the district. There are expressions in some of the cases which indicate that the place of confinement must be within the court's territorial jurisdiction in order to enable it to issue the writ.