The New York Times has an interesting piece on Korea’s newly introduced jury trial system:
This year, with little public preparation, South Korea took its first steps toward adopting a jury system. After about 20 mock trials in the second half of 2007, the first real one with a jury took place in February, followed by a series of others.
The change is still provisional, though. After a test period of several years, the Supreme Court is to decide which aspects of the system should be made permanent. For the time being, jurors play only an advisory role; judges are not bound to follow jurors’ opinions about verdicts and sentences.
But legal experts say that citizen participation has already had a discernible impact on the legal process. In a court system with no presumption of innocence, jury trials appear to be leading to a higher rate of acquittals, as jurors debate and question prosecutors’ assumptions.
Read the rest on your own.
(HT to reader)
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That article does NOTHING to bolster my faith in Korea’s legal system. The description of the murder trial is shocking.
Read this in another paper. Loved the part about the murder trial and the judge is trying to hurry up the jury decision so he can beat the rush hour traffic. Ain’t justice great in Korea?
#1… don’t just spout off. i don’t know where you’re from but the fact is that no perfect system exists anywhere. thats the reality of justice, and we need make no comparisons with other systems to confirm this.
here in Korea, they have labored under a particularly awful legal system for an awfully long time. They system, which places all the power in the hands of a small cadre of prosecutors and judges who all go to school together, is deeply entrenched. and the bottom line is that it will not change overnight. no legal systems does, even when the society that is most affected by it (read: the koreans) recognizes the need for change (it’s questionable whether legal reform is a major issue in the daily life of most Koreans). I see the jury system as a general step in the right direction and the Koreans should be applauded for finding the political will to make this change happen despite the powerful vested interests (read: prosecutors and judges) who are lined up against it.
SCENE ONE. Setting: the deliberation room.
Juror 1 to Juror 2: How old are you?
Once the ages are determined, it’s just a matter of falling in line and following one’s senior. A verdict quickly follows.
(One would hope that it doesn’t happen this way.)
whitey: you’ve got it all figured out, don’t you? well done.
“Korean Society in a Nutshell by a Guy Named Whitey”. You’ve got the makings of a great book there.
@5 mjw
Are you related to swlee, by any chance?
not at all.
1. Introducing the jury to today’s Korean legal system is absolutely ridiculous. In the United States, questions of procedure and evidence admissibility is separated from the jury. But in this article we learn that the judges and prosecutors had to explain to the jury all the procedural decisions that they were making. The result? The jury is confused and has heard misleading, confusing, and prejudicial evidence.
2. A question: Korea doesn’t have the presumption of innocence? That’s what the article says. Is this true?
Shit, makes you wonder why Amnesty International isn’t knocking at the President’s door.
…maybe they will be knocking after this article.
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