AEMS: AEMS Database

In 1942, three courageous men defied military orders that culminated in the incarceration of 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry during World War II. In three separate cases, Minoru Yasui, Gordon Hirabayashi, and Fred Korematsu were convicted of violating curfew and internment orders and their convictions were upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court. Nearly forty years later this film traces the history of the young third-generation Japanese American legal teams that, in the 1980's, fought to right this injustice by invoking a rarely used legal procedure--a petition for a writ of error coram nobis, which asks that a trial court correct a fundamental error and injustice committed at the time of the trial.