Stone insisted on handing down the opinion quickly. Rutledge, the last appointee of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, worked through the night to complete his dissent in time.
"More is at stake than Gen. Yamashita's fate," he began. "There could be no possible sympathy for him if he is guilty of the atrocities for which his death is sought. But there can be and should be justice administered according to law."
He then tried to show how the trial, at every stage, had ignored the rules of fairness.
The majority opinion and Rutledge's dissent were read at the Supreme Court on Feb. 4, 1946. Justice Frank Murphy also dissented. The ninth member of the court, Justice Robert H. Jackson, was absent, leading the prosecution of Nazi officials at the war crimes trials at Nuremberg.
Two weeks after the ruling, Yamashita was hanged.
"The dissent in Yamashita took courage, for Rutledge's case file brims with letters berating him for supporting a 'Jap,' " Diane Marie Amann, a former Stevens clerk who is now a law professor at UC Davis, wrote this year in the Fordham Law Review.
In an interview, she added: "I think the lesson that Wiley Rutledge learned was that you have to be especially vigilant about the government's claims in times of emergency." Shortly after Rutledge joined the court, he had voted with the majority to uphold the military's internment of Japanese Americans on the West Coast. It was a decision that the court came to regret.
"That lesson was not lost on Stevens. Even in times of emergency, we have to live up to the traditions of the law," Amann said.
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In military law, the Yamashita case established the precedent that commanders are responsible for the actions of their troops. It was less clear as a precedent for the use of military tribunals.
In 1866, after the Civil War, the Supreme Court condemned the use of military trials and said they must be confined to "the theater of active military operations." Its decision overturned the conviction of a Confederate sympathizer, L.P. Milligan, who had been tried in a military court in Indiana and sentenced to die for conspiring to free Union troops' prisoners.
But in 1942, the high court upheld the military trials and death sentences handed out that year to Nazi saboteurs who had secretly landed on Long Island, N.Y. That decision served as a precedent for upholding Yamashita's conviction.
This year, Bush administration lawyers cited the Yamashita case four times in their brief to the Supreme Court defending military tribunals.
That may have been unwise.
As the author of the majority opinion, Justice Stevens had the last word. He described Yamashita's trial as a "glaring" and "notorious" exception to the American tradition of fairness in military trials. He wrote that, at the time, it "generated an unusually long and vociferous critique" from two justices.
And "at least partially in response to subsequent criticism of Gen. Yamashita's trial," he continued, the U.S. Uniform Code of Military Justice and the Geneva Convention were revised to add new standards of fairness.
The Yamashita case, Stevens concluded, "has been stripped of its precedential value" -- vindicating Justice Rutledge's dissent 60 years after it was handed down.
