Background
Padgett grew up during the Great Depression and earned a scholarship to Harvard College in Massachusetts.
Padgett grew up during the Great Depression and earned a scholarship to Harvard College in Massachusetts.
Harvard College; Harvard University.
Before he could graduate however, he was called to active duty in the United States. Army Air Force and for the next 13 months, trained as a pilot. In 1944, Padgett and a crew of ten, flew their B-24 heavy bomber from Mitchell Field in New York to an airbase in southeastern China. There, as part of the 373rd Squadron, 308 Bomb Group, 14th.
Air Force, they began bombing operations against the Japanese.
On January 1, 1945, while on their 13th. mission, they were hit by enemy anti-aircraft fire and forced to bail out. Coming down spread out across the French Indochinese countryside, Padgett and several others were captured by the Japanese.
He was tortured by the Kempetai while in Hanoi. He was then transferred down to the Saigon Kempetai prison where he spent the next eight months until the war ended.
After the war, Padgett spent many months in military hospitals recovering from the tropical diseases (Malaria, Beri-Beri and amoebic dysentery) he had contracted while a prisoner.
He went back to school and earned his law degree from Harvard College in 1948. He and his family moved to Honolulu, Hawaii in 1948, where Padgett was offered a job with an old and reputable law firm, Robertson, Castle and Anthony. On December 7, 1941 all that changed.
Martial law and the fear of internment made people wary and apprehensive, afraid to go to the temple and participate. they no longer saw their shrine as a place of refuge, but rather a place of potential danger.
Many in the Japanese community had been arrested after the start of World World War II and sent to internment camps on the mainland. In his ruling, Judge J. McLaughlin found the Attorney General’s office in violation of the First Amendment rights of plaintiffs with reference to Robert H. Jackson in "American Communications Association v.
Douds". Padgett went on to practice law in Honolulu for the next thirty years before being appointed to the Hawaii Intermediate Court of Appeals in 1980.
Then, in 1982, he was appointed to the Hawaii Supreme Court as an associate justice. He served on the court for ten years until his retirement in 1992.
In December 1947, despite the absence of a priest, members of Kotohira Jinsha began trying to restore religious worship at the shrine. When the case went to trial in 1950, Federal Judge Frank McLaughlin ruled against the government and the land was released back to the members of the Kotohira Jinsha community.