His brother George recalled how he would stand at the kitchen sink saving ants from drowning, in accordance with the Buddhist principle of the sanctity of life.
[3] He worked for a time in a federal bank in San Francisco, and in 1940 moved to Japan to study in a Buddhist monastery near Tokyo.
His Japanese language skills won him consideration for the Counter Intelligence Corps, but he was rejected because a background check led officials to suspect he might be homosexual and the time he had spent in Japan made them question his loyalty.
Another said Thomson had refused Provoo's demand to move American prisoners out of hospital beds to make room for Japanese troops.
[9] His trial was initially scheduled to begin in January 1950, but it was repeatedly delayed as the government sought to gather more witnesses and at one point in 1951 by Provoo's commitment to the Bellevue Hospital Center for psychiatric evaluation at the request of the prosecution.
Lawyers had to shout their questions at him, as his exposure to loud shell bursts during the war had left him with a severe hearing impairment.
When the prosecutor asked, "Now, Mr. Provoo, isn't it a fact that in November 1946 you were hospitalized at Camp Lee, Virginia, because of homosexual aberrations?
[17] On August 27, 1954, a unanimous three-judge panel of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals overturned his conviction on the grounds that the cross-examination about his alleged homosexuality had prejudiced the jury and the venue was improper.
[8] Judge Thomas Walter Swan wrote:[14] It is obvious that the cross-examination informed the jury that on several occasions after reenlistment the defendant had been charged with being, or suspected by military authorities or hospital doctors of being, a homosexualist.
They had no relevancy to charges on which he was being tried and were certain to degrade him in the eyes of the jury.Of the government's argument that the questioning was a legitimate way of testing Provoo's veracity, he wrote:[14] No authority has been cited which suggests that homosexuality indicates a propensity to disregard the obligation of an oath.
The sole purpose and effect of this examination was to humiliate and degrade the defendant, and increase the probability that he would be convicted, not for the crime charged, but for his general unsavory character.
[17] He was indicted again by a federal grand jury in Maryland on October 27, 1954, but U.S. District Court Judge Roszel C. Thomsen dismissed the case in March 1955, stating that Provoo's right to a speedy trial under 6th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution had been abrogated.
[5] The court noted that Provoo had spent five years in prison and that the government was responsible for much of the delay and for the fact that the New York conviction had been overturned.
The court cited documents that had become part of the record showing that the government had brought the case in New York because they thought they had a greater chance of winning a conviction there.
[21] In September 1957, he was arrested in Lincoln, Nebraska, and pleaded guilty to a charge of contributing to the delinquency of a minor, a 16-year-old runaway boy from Maryland.