R. M. Takasugi, Pioneering Asian Judge, Dies at 78
Robert M. Takasugi, who as a boy spent most of World War II with his family in a California internment camp and grew up to become the one of the first Japanese-Americans to serve as a federal judge, died Tuesday in Los Angeles. He was 78 and lived in Montebello, Calif.
Judge Takasugi was nominated by President Gerald R. Ford in 1976 to fill a vacancy on the United States District Court for the Central District of California. He presided over the 1984 trial of the automobile executive John Z. DeLorean, who was accused of cocaine trafficking. Mr. DeLorean was acquitted after months of pre-trial hearings and a 22-week trial that included at least one circus moment. That was provided by Larry Flynt, the publisher of Hustler Magazine, who had furnished television stations with surveillance videotapes of Mr. DeLorean, in one of them seeming to close a drug deal. Forced into court to discuss the tapes, Mr. Flynt showed up shouting obscenities and wearing a diaper made of an American flag. Judge Takasugi was widely praised for maintaining control.
In 2002, only months after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Judge Takasugi threw out a case brought by the federal government against seven people who made charitable donations to an Iranian military group the government had classified as a terrorist group. He held unconstitutional a 1996 law that made it a crime to offer “material support” to any foreign group the State Department considered a threat to national security. Because the law offered the groups “no notice and no opportunity” to contest the designation as terrorist, it violated due process, he said...
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Judge Takasugi was nominated by President Gerald R. Ford in 1976 to fill a vacancy on the United States District Court for the Central District of California. He presided over the 1984 trial of the automobile executive John Z. DeLorean, who was accused of cocaine trafficking. Mr. DeLorean was acquitted after months of pre-trial hearings and a 22-week trial that included at least one circus moment. That was provided by Larry Flynt, the publisher of Hustler Magazine, who had furnished television stations with surveillance videotapes of Mr. DeLorean, in one of them seeming to close a drug deal. Forced into court to discuss the tapes, Mr. Flynt showed up shouting obscenities and wearing a diaper made of an American flag. Judge Takasugi was widely praised for maintaining control.
In 2002, only months after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Judge Takasugi threw out a case brought by the federal government against seven people who made charitable donations to an Iranian military group the government had classified as a terrorist group. He held unconstitutional a 1996 law that made it a crime to offer “material support” to any foreign group the State Department considered a threat to national security. Because the law offered the groups “no notice and no opportunity” to contest the designation as terrorist, it violated due process, he said...