A Daejeon court has ruled that you’ll need more than catching your spouse naked with another man/woman in order to charge him/her with adultery.
In a appeal decision, the court ruled, “You cannot conclude that adultery has taken place only because a man and a woman were together in the same house naked or in their underwear.”
On May 9 of last year, Mrs. A and Mr. B were caught in an advanced state of undress in Mr. B’s home by Mrs. A’s husband and an accompanying police officer. They were accordingly charged with adultery, which is a criminal offense in Korea. When a lower court ruled the two “not-guilty” on June 1, the prosecutors filed an appeal.
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23 Comments
“You cannot conclude that adultery has taken place only because a man and a woman were together in the same house naked or in their underwear.”
Well, if one of those 2 is your spouse, then I would have to say that yes, I can and will conclude that adultery has taken place.
It all depends on what your definition of “adultery” is…
Let he who is without sin cast the first wife.
Hang on, this is a criminal case, right? The burden of proof for criminal trials in all modern legal systems is beyond a reasonable doubt. If the US, or Britain, or Japan, or any other modern country had criminal adultery, it stands to reason that the standard of proof would be the same, and that the semi-naked spouse would walk free.
However, I would assume that Nomad’s comment is correct in Korean family law as far as suing for divorce. Again, in New York and Japan, the standard for proving adultery in a divorce action is the typical civil standard: preponderance of the evidence. So seeing your spouse and another person go to a motel while holding hands, check in, then check out 3 hours later, is sufficient grounds to sue for divorce. So my hunch is that the bereved spouse in this case has solid grounds to sue for divorce.
Conclusion: the news is good for adulterers in Korea in that it will be hard for them to face criminal charges, but be ready to be slapped with a divorce suit.
Fun fact: Japan adopted its criminal code from the French Napoleonic Code, which included the crime of adultery only to adulterous wives. However, Japan abolished the crime (article 183) upon adopting the new constitution that granted women and men equal legal rights. My understanding is that Korea and Taiwan had the same law, but when forced to modernize it with equal rights, they chose to expand the law instead of abolish it.
Second fun fact: New York and Japan share nothing in common regarding the development of their family law, but the law for marriage and divorce in both jurisdictions is 99% the same.
The keyword for adultery here is “sexual intercourse”, sônggwanggye, whether it can be proven that it has taken place. The news includes also the following:
As Curzon points out, in a criminal suit such as the one mentioned above, you need to actually prove that sexual intercourse took place to convict both the spouse and her partner for “criminal conversation,” as I believe the crime is called. The civil suit, on the other hand, is probably different, although I couldn’t say for certain as I’m not a lawyer.
Can an alliance partner such as the U.S. sue the ROK for getting in bed with North Korea?
“Can an alliance partner such as the U.S. sue the ROK for getting in bed with North Korea?”
No, because the US is the one getting f**ked.
I tend to view the ROK since DJ and especially under Roh as the trusting, mildly retarded girl who gets abused by a sleasy, diseased man on one of those Law & Order SVU reruns and thinks it’s love. She ran away from a comfortable middle-class home to rebel and is now seeking help from China, which, she fails to fathom, remains an evil step-mother to the sleasy man.
Mrs. A’s husband, Mr. H.: “Am I hallucinating here? Just what in the hell do you think you’re doing?”
“Learning about Cuba, and having some food.”
One more judge who thinks he knows everything…
Any psycholgist will tell you that adulterous sex is merely the physical manifestation of an affaire.
Funny stuff.
Let’s take this a step further. Just because there is semen in the, cough, cough, “va-geena” doesn’t prove that sexual intercourse has taken place. It could have gotten there through any sort of means.
Iceberg, maybe, but that would imply the participation in some pretty strange fetishes…or a comedy of errors of incredible magnitude.
You got chocolate in my peanut butter! I can only imagine what the explanation for something like that would be.
It does seem to be an immaculate deception of sorts. I wonder what the Judge’s wife is up to just now . . .
and if Mr. B was a foreigner……would that have changed the outcome?
Aha! This explains why the MP’s just let the command sponsored field grade male go after we caught him in Itaewon after curfew with a junior enlisted male in a car last night.
If you’re not married, you’re not guilty.
Yeah, but what were these two fellows doing in the car? Heading out for a burger, right?
Mr Carr, make that Bugger
LOL
Korea and Taiwan share the protected Confucianism from Communist revolution.
In a traditional COnfucianism affected society, husband and wife are anot equal.
However, In modernization, adultery in Korea is only working as woman’s
tool for collecting divorce money by threeatening the criminal accuse of her husband. It is partly right to say that adultery has benefited women in taht sense.
Its the difference of Muslim nations and Korea, I think.
It also reflect the history of Korea that accepted democracy by importing
Western laws not the spirit.