President Gerald Ford granted Toguri a full pardon, making her the first U.S. citizen convicted of treason to be pardoned.
On January 19, 1977 — his final full day in office — President Gerald R. Ford granted Iva Toguri D'Aquino a full and unconditional presidential pardon, restoring her United States citizenship nearly three decades after her controversial treason conviction. She is recognized as the first and only person convicted of treason in United States history to receive a presidential pardon.
The pardon followed years of investigative journalism, most notably a 1976 documentary and newspaper reporting that revealed key prosecution witnesses had later recanted, admitting under oath that U.S. occupation officials had coached and threatened them into giving false testimony implicating Toguri during her 1949 trial. Japanese American civil rights organizations, including the Japanese American Citizens League, campaigned vigorously for her exoneration, framing her case as emblematic of the wartime racial prejudice and hysteria directed at Japanese Americans.
The pardon was a landmark moment not only for Toguri personally, but for American legal and civil rights history, symbolizing a rare formal governmental acknowledgment that a wartime prosecution had been fundamentally unjust. It closed a 32-year saga stretching from her 1945 arrest through imprisonment and stigmatization, restoring her legal standing as an American citizen and vindicating her lifelong insistence that she had never intended disloyalty to her country.