[Yubumsuk]

It's been an interesting year to observe legal proceedings in Korea. Now, don't get me wrong, I do rather like living in a country where you can drink anywhere, any time you want (except in a pool hall or bowling alley, of all places), choose what parts of your work contract to follow because you know your employer hasn't read it, boss around anyone younger than you, leave a mess that 'some ajumma' will clean up, be a highly valued employee by virtue of not being fat or hideously ugly and in a cheap, factory-produced suit (like I am as I type this), disregard any sort of political correctness unless it concerns national psyche, and generally never have to bother minding your Ps and Qs unless you're dealing with people at your workplace who are older than you.

However, at some point for a country to advance from one stage to another it requires a legal system that takes into consideration such things as consistency, precedent, the rule of law, due process, freedom choice, guilt, doubt, the truth, fault, and other such matters that are sometimes forgotten about when Korean policemen, lawyers, and judges are dealing with cases. In the past several years we have seen:

- A man get 5 years in prison for marijuana smuggling.
- A woman get 18 months for adultery.
- A CEO get a pardon for massive fraud and tax evasion.
- A teacher hospitalise a student by beating him over 200 times with a stick, not get charged, and keep his job.
- A 4th grade teacher get fined W4,000,000 ($3,000) for repeatedly groping a student's crotch and keep his job.
- Four men get suspended sentences for raping a mentally disabled child in their care over a period of seven years and get to keep custody of her!
- A baseball player charged with seduction and forced into an out-of-court settlement. That's right, seduction. He seduced a woman with hopes of marriage and it became a police matter.
- Chinese students riot and assult people yet not get deported.

When is the Korean legal system going to wake up to the following ideas:

1. A sentence should be in proportion to the harm and damage a crime caused.
2. To establish guilt one has to establish intent.
3. The same law applies to everyone.
4. Self-defence is a defence against assault.
5. Truth is a defence against slander and libel.
6. The sexual lives and acts of consenting adults are in no way police business.
7. Someone found guilty of a serious offence loses his or her right to anonymity.
8. Men and boys are capable of being sexually assaulted to the same extent women are.
9. Anyone who intentionally murders another human being should lose his or her freedom for life.
10. Certain crimes must be punished with jail time and not paid off.

Would the ten things listed above really be that difficult to follow on an unreasonable western imposition?

[un.mei]

not that any of those punishments were ridiculous...
but even the US has a lot of these cases... x:
like the soldier that wanted custody of his kids bc they were being raped and molested by their step father...
yet he didn't get them and they were placed back into the care of their mother who allowed all this...
or how we still can't get the separation of church and state right...
i mean there are many stories like this within the us too x:
but then again ... i think a lot of them were florida too x:

[luna81]

not that any of those punishments were ridiculous...
but even the US has a lot of these cases... x:
like the soldier that wanted custody of his kids bc they were being raped and molested by their step father...
yet he didn't get them and they were placed back into the care of their mother who allowed all this...
or how we still can't get the separation of church and state right...
i mean there are many stories like this within the us too x:
but then again ... i think a lot of them were florida too x:

It's about Korean Mediaeval Law why bring the US into it, talk about the fallacies of US legal system in another thread. And I'm not a US apologizer, I complain about US laws too. But it's not a comparison about which country is better than which country. Just because US has stupid laws too, we can't discuss laws from other countries? I hate it when people feel personally offended when there are bad news about people from their respective countries. Most reasonable people are not stupid enough to believe that everybody from that country is bad so don't get so offended right off the bat.

[Yubumsuk]

not that any of those punishments were ridiculous...
but even the US has a lot of these cases... x:
like the soldier that wanted custody of his kids bc they were being raped and molested by their step father...
yet he didn't get them and they were placed back into the care of their mother who allowed all this...
or how we still can't get the separation of church and state right...
i mean there are many stories like this within the us too x:
but then again ... i think a lot of them were florida too x:

The US has a lot of problems, too, of course, though those usually stem from PCness conflicting with reality. However, most western countries went through discarding laws relating to sexual acts between consenting adults in the 50s and 60s and clarified once and for all that the government has no place in the bedrooms of the nation, as Trudeau put it. The same goes for sentencing guidelines (though of course plea-bargaining remains a major problem). The only place where I see much similarity between the US and Korea is in the abuse of presidential pardons.

When it comes to financial laws, Korea really needs to look at how it's shooting itself in the foot. The effects of declining foreign direct investment on the won are finally being felt, and the biggest reason for the drop in FDA is that foreigners don't want to invest in a system they just plain can't trust.

[Kimyusin]

Korean laws are bit strange from the western prospective.
It's very heavily culturally/politically influenced rather than pure logical judgment.

Just recently SK introduced jury system, therefore many horrific criminals got away from maximum penalty they used face before. Not too mention death penalty is officially ended in 2007.

There is alot of Neo-Confucian characteristics in Korean laws.

[Yubumsuk]

Korean laws are bit strange from the western prospective.
It's very heavily culturally/politically influenced rather than pure logical judgment.

Just recently SK introduced jury system, therefore many horrific criminals got away from maximum penalty they used face before. Not too mention death penalty is officially ended in 2007.

There is alot of Neo-Confucian characteristics in Korean laws.

Actually I think that jury trials are still in their trial (so to speak) stage. Quite frankly, I can't see them working, because the concept of 'jury of your peers' doesn't exist. Unless they're all about your age, sex, and education, in Korea they're not your peers. Have you ever tried to do committee work with Koreans of different ages? It just doesn't work. I was at a seminar workshop where I ended up in a small group with a middle-age woman and two younger women (planning TEFL lesson using music). The middle-age woman came up with all the ideas, I, as the only native English speaker in the group, became the secretary, editor, and revisor of the finished product, and the other two just agreed with whatever we said.

'So what do you think, Miss Lee'?

'OK'

'You don't want to add any ideas'?

'OK'.

I just can't imagine people with such a mentality working on a jury. I can just imagine them taking a secret ballot and, say, two people voting 'not guilty'. The jury foreman (and most likely a man, 50+, and a company manager or senior civil servant) asks 'OK, so why do some of you think he's not guilty'? ... Silence as Miss Kim and Miss Park look nervously around.

Although there are a lot of modern legal features I wish Korea would adopt a jury system is one I can't see working.

As for the Confucian aspect to it, ideally Confucianism teaches that the strong protect the weak. I don't see a whole lot of that in the system here.