Can you hear me?

The petition put the Justice Department, which had the responsibility for responding to it, in a position of having to defend the government's action during internment, knowing that the department itself had failed to get accurate information to the court in the original case.

In preliminary discussions with U.S. District Judge Marilyn Hall Patel, who was presiding over the case, Justice Department lawyers tried to evade the issue. They suggested a pardon for Korematsu instead of proceeding with the case in court, but Korematsu didn't want forgiveness for refusing to do something he believed was unlawful.

The Justice Department also was unable to persuade Patel not to make formal findings of fact that would fix the blame on the government for the original misrepresentation. After studying the initial positions of Justice's attorneys, Patel said she viewed the department's position as "tantamount to confessing an error."

She set a hearing for Nov. 10, 1983, in a larger, ceremonial courtroom, anticipating the many internees and their families who would want to witness the historic hearing.

Toward the end of the hearing, in an unusual move, Patel invited Korematsu, then 64, to speak. The courtroom stilled as Korematsu spoke for several minutes. "As long as my record stands in federal court, any American citizen can be held in prison or concentration camps without a trial or a hearing," he said.

Everyone expected Patel to take the case under submission for a later ruling, as would be normal. But, in another surprise, she ruled from the bench, saying she intended to both vacate the conviction and make formal findings of fact -- everything Korematsu's attorneys had asked for.

"I don't think I was quite prepared for the response to it," Patel said in Fournier's documentary, "because it really didn't seem to me there was a dry eye in the courtroom."

Irons, who had been seated next to Korematsu during the hearing, said, "The audience literally was stunned. They had just witnessed an unprecedented event that this whole internment issue had been resolved by a court 40 years later in their favor." In her later written ruling vacating Korematsu's conviction, Patel said in part: "(Korematsu) stands as a caution that in times of distress the shield of military necessity and national security must not be used to protect governmental actions from close scrutiny and accountability...."Yasui's conviction was vacated in 1984, although no evidentiary hearing was held. Hirabayashi's conviction was vacated in 1987 by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which found that the government had engaged in "suppression of evidence" in its presentation of his original case to the Supreme Court.In 1971, Congress repealed the law under which all three had been convicted. Five years later, President Ford acknowledged that the internment had been a "national mistake," and, in 1983, a federal commission unanimously concluded that the factors that shaped the internment decision were "race prejudice, war hysteria and a failure of political leadership" rather than military necessity.

President Reagan in 1988 declared the internment a "grave injustice" and signed legislation authorizing reparations of $20,000 each to thousands of surviving internees, including Korematsu. In 1999, President Clinton awarded Korematsu a presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor.

"In the long history of our country's constant search for justice, some names of ordinary citizens stand for millions of souls -- Plessy, Brown, Parks," Clinton said. "To that distinguished list today we add the name of Fred Korematsu."

The "Fred T. Korematsu v. U.S. Coram Nobis Litigation Collection" -- 36 boxes of legal research, pleadings, memoranda, internal correspondence and personal litigation papers -- is now housed in the University of California-Los Angeles' Asian American Studies Center and the Young Research Library's Department of Special Collections.