Category: crime & punishment

The plagiarizers in Korea are not even trying very hard any more to hide their deception when they are just changing book covers:

Prosecutors said Tuesday they would charge 200 professors for copyright violations next month, suspecting them of changing the covers of existing books by other people and publishing them in their own names.

The Uijeongbu District Prosecutors’ Office called in 200 professors from 50 universities for questioning over the past three months. As most of the accused, including well-known lecturers, admitted to the charges, they will be indicted next month, prosecutors said. [Korea Herald]

You can read the rest at the link.

What I have learned this week is that you can rape teenagers in Korea as long as you say you love them, but if you touch a minor inappropriately and film it you will go to jail:

A man who asked his girlfriend to harass sexually her eight-year-old son was sentenced to three years and six months in jail.

According to Suwon District Court, the man, 43, identified as Park, incited his 40-year-old girlfriend, identified as Kim, to abuse her son sexually and film it on her smartphone.

Park said he wanted to see Kim touching her son’s bodyparts while he was asleep, and asked her to send a video in December 2014. Kim and Park had been having an affair for three years since 2012.

Kim filmed her son and sent the video to Park.

Kim was indicted for filming a minor, and also sentenced to three years with five years probation. [Korea Times]

For anyone that wants to commit statutory rape in Korea, just say that you loved the victim and the Supreme Court will find you not guilty of the crime:

The Supreme Court will review the case of a man, 46, who was found not guilty of raping a teenage girl, Yonhap has reported. Prosecutors appealed the Seoul High Court’s “not-guilty” ruling on Thursday.

But the nation’s highest court is unlikely to change its stance on the case, which it has reviewed before, legal sources said.

The man, identified only as “A” and owner of an entertainment company, was indicted for allegedly raping a middle school student 27 years his junior.

According to evidence given at lower court trials, the man had sexual relations with the woman, identified as “B,” many times and got her pregnant in 2011. “B” was 15 at the time.

“A” was indicted after “B” reported to police that she was raped.

“A” was found guilty at the first and second trials.

But last November the Supreme Court overturned the lower court’s decision, as “A” kept insisting he had loved “B.” It sent the case back to the lower court, which ruled on Oct. 16 that he is not guilty of rape.  [Korea Times via the Marmot’s Hole]

How would you like to be the Company Commander for the unit this guy belonged to and got the phone call from authorities about what this guy did?  The most frustrating part of the article is that the shooter says his military training took over to explain what he did.  I’m not sure where shooting people driving by in a truck and holding a gun to a woman’s head was part of military training?  I hope he enjoys the corrective training he is going to receive in a federal penitentiary:

A special operations soldier accused of shooting a man in Tillicum on Thursday was trying to take the man’s truck and apparently failed at other carjackings after the shooting, according to charging papers.

Pierce County prosecutors said Monday they believe the man who was shot is in critical condition, in a medically induced coma, and they were not sure of his prognosis.

Spc. Jesse Suhanec, 22, of the 2nd Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment, is charged with first- and second-degree assault, three counts of attempted first-degree robbery and one count of attempted first-degree burglary.

Suhanec is based at Joint Base Lewis-McChord.

He pleaded not guilty Monday, and Court Commissioner Meagan Foley set bail at $1 million. Court records did not list an attorney for Suhanec.

According to charging papers:

The 30-year-old victim was on his way to discuss a parenting plan with his ex-wife when she heard multiple gunshots near her house about 10:10 a.m.

The man was shot the 15100 block of Grant Avenue Southwest and drove to a nearby fast-food restaurant, where he sounded the horn of the truck.

Two soldiers found him with gunshot wounds to his head and shoulders. At the hospital, doctors took out one bullet and left others as they treated him.

Meanwhile, Suhanec, who had checked out a van from his military unit, left the vehicle behind and headed down the street from the shooting.

He put a gun to a woman’s head in her driveway and said he’d kill her if she didn’t give him her car keys. [News Tribune]

You can read the rest at the link, but it only gets worse.

So basically when it was all said and done Lieutenant General Franklin who was forced to retire because of this was actually right:

An Air Force sexual assault case that spanned two investigations, a lieutenant general’s forced retirement and a finding of unlawful command influence ended after more than three years Wednesday with the acquittal of Airman 1st Class Brandon T. Wright.

A military jury made up of officers and enlisted personnel — six men and one woman — found Wright not guilty at Joint Base Andrews, Md., after three hours of deliberation.

The accuser’s former Special Victims’ Counsel said the verdict, although disappointing, was not a complete loss.

“I’m disappointed that the panel did not convict him; however, I am happy that the Air Force finally took the case seriously, as it should have from the start, and my former client received the day in court that she deserved,” Maribel Jarzabek said. “I think the fact that the jury deliberated for three hours and asked to see some of the evidence showed that this wasn’t the slam-dunk case that Gen. (Craig) Franklin and others predicted it would be.”

Wright was accused of raping a staff sergeant in her apartment near Aviano Air Base, Italy, after a night of drinking and socializing in 2012.

Wright’s defense, which focused its closing argument on the prosecution’s burden of proving guilt beyond a reasonable doubt and what the defense lawyers characterized as inconsistencies in the woman’s statements over the past three-plus years, hailed the verdict.

Maj. Jacob Ramer and Cpt. Patrick Hughes said in a statement that “panel member(s) understood the importance of their role and gave their full attention to resolving the question before them.”

They also said that Wright’s unit had been “monumental in… helping him through the most difficult time of his young life.”

Wright did not testify.

After an Article 32 preliminary hearing in the case, then-Lt. Gen. Craig Franklin, concurring with the hearing officer’s and legal adviser’s advice, dismissed the case in 2013.  [Stars & Stripes]

You can read the rest at the link, but you have to like the spin the prosecution is coming up with.  What is the purpose then of an Article 32 if someone who accuses someone of a crime deserve to have their day in court like the prosecution claims?  Lt. Gen. Franklin has now been vindicated that this case did not have enough evidence to get a conviction.  Also if anything deliberating only three hours shows how weak of a case this was. Even more troubling about this case is that it was so weak despite having the entire Air Force legal community trying to get a conviction to include using unlawful command influence:

An Air Force judge has ruled that the service’s top legal officer committed unlawful command influence in a sexual assault case, partly for political motives. Nonetheless, the case will proceed to court-martial.

Lt. Col. Joshua Kastenberg, in a July 30 ruling in response to a defense motion to dismiss the case against Airman 1st Class Brandon T. Wright, found that Lt. Gen. Richard Harding, formerly the Air Force Judge Advocate General, had improperly influenced the case or had given the appearance of doing so.

One such instance, the judge ruled, was recommending that Wright’s case be transferred to another court-martial convening authority for a do-over after the first convening authority, Lt. Gen. Craig Franklin, dismissed the case in the summer of 2013. Franklin’s dismissal came after an Article 32 investigative hearing at Aviano Air Base, Italy.

Such transfers are almost unheard of. It happened in the Wright case, Kastenberg’s ruling says, in part because Harding was worried that “the failure to have charges preferred against SrA Wright would enable Senator Kirsten Gillibrand to gain needed votes on a pending bill to remove commanders from the court-martial process.”

The ruling took Harding to task for supposedly telling Col. Joseph Bialke, Franklin’s legal adviser, that sexual assault cases, absent “smoking gun” evidence about an alleged victim’s credibility, should be sent to court-martial. In so doing, Kastenberg wrote, Harding improperly attempted to shape Bialke’s future legal advice. Katsenberg ruled that the forced retirements of Bialke and Franklin after their handling of the Wright case created an appearance of unlawful command influence.  [Stars & Stripes]

All this case has likely done is force other convening authorities to send flimsy sexual assault cases to trial to protect their careers after seeing what happened to Lt. Gen. Franklin.

The Itaewon Burger King murder trial has started with former convict for the murder Edward Lee pointing the finger at Arthur John Patterson as the murderer of Korean student Cho Choong-pil:

During the questioning, Lee found it difficult to recall the situation in which the murder took place in April 1997, but the Korean-American said in the courtroom that he saw Patterson suddenly turning to the victim and stabbing him.

“When the murder took place, I went to the bathroom to wash my hands,” he said. “Patterson suddenly started to stab him. I turned around and I was shocked.

“Cho was trying to hit the accused with his right hand, but Patterson stabbed him and kept stabbing him.”

He admitted that there were only three people including Patterson, Cho and himself at the crime scene. But he continued to accuse Patterson of murdering Cho.

He also took issue with the credibility of the past investigation records and how he was treated during the questioning by the police and prosecutors.

“I have consistently asked for an interpreter, but they didn’t provide me with one,” he said. “I was interrogated without an interpreter, coerced and threated during the first investigation for 17 hours. They didn’t let me go to sleep.”   [Korea Herald]

You can read the rest at the link, but Patterson continues to claim that Lee is the actual murderer.  I feel so bad for the victim’s mother who also testified and had to listen to the details about how her son was killed for no reason and then see these two each deny responsibility.  Even if Lee did not commit the murder he is still culpable for not saying anything after it happened.  If he saw Patterson stabbing someone to death he should of at least immediately alerted people in the restaurant to call the police and paramedics.

I am sure there is probably some crazy back story to this case:

A 40-year-old woman has been indicted on charges of forcing her husband to have sex with her, prosecutors said Tuesday.

It marks the first time that a wife has been charged with marital rape. The Supreme Court recognized spousal rape as a crime in May 2013.

The Seoul Central Prosecutors’ Office investigating the case alleges that the wife, only identified by her surname Shim, locked her husband, surnamed Kim, inside their house for 29 hours and forced him to have sex with her.

Shim allegedly committed the crime with the aim of obtaining favorable evidence to use for divorce procedures, the prosecutors said. [Korea Times]

You can read more at the link, but no word if Songtan Sally was the perpetrator involved with this case.

With the amount of money this guy was able to fraud people out of, it seems it would be really easy for him to bribe people to fake his death:

The purported death of Cho Hee-pal, the mastermind behind South Korea’s largest-ever fraud case, returned to the spotlight as his close aide was arrested in China last week, with fresh testimonies suggesting he is actually still alive.

Cho is one of the most-wanted conmen in South Korea, having allegedly scammed up to 50,000 people out of an estimated 4 trillion won ($3.5 billion) in a pyramid marketing scheme.

The purported death of Cho Hee-pal, the mastermind behind South Korea’s largest-ever fraud case, returned to the spotlight as his close aide was arrested in China last week, with fresh testimonies suggesting he is actually still alive.

Cho is one of the most-wanted conmen in South Korea, having allegedly scammed up to 50,000 people out of an estimated 4 trillion won ($3.5 billion) in a pyramid marketing scheme.  [Korea Herald]

You can read the rest at the link, but just think the $3.5 billion this guy swindled people out of is nothing compared to the $18 billion Bernie Madoff swindle people out of the in the US.  At least Madoff is sitting in jail unlike Cho who likely still living freely in China.

Does everyone remember the Itaewon Burger King murder case?  Well it is back for round two of two decade long effort to convict the then dependent of USFK contractor of murdering a Hongik University student back in 1997:

The two original suspects in a high-profile 1997 Itaewon murder case could potentially be brought back together today in a preparatory session before the start of legal proceedings in the trial against 36-year-old American Arthur Patterson.

Patterson and his friend, Edward Lee, were accused of killing Hongik University student Cho Jung-pil at a fast food restaurant on April 3, 1997, in Itaewon, a popular foreigner-friendly district in central Seoul.

Cho was found dead in the bathroom of a Burger King, stabbed nine times in his neck and chest. The two men, then 18, were both in the restaurant at the time of the murder and both pinpointed the other in the killing.

Lee, a Korean-American, was later convicted for the murder but was acquitted of those charges in 1998 by the Supreme Court, which ruled that there was insufficient evidence to conclude that the murder had been carried out by one man.

He will attend as a witness in the trial against Patterson, who was originally charged and convicted for weapons possession and destruction of evidence before fleeing to the United States in 1999.

“We have confirmed that Lee … is currently staying in Korea,” a prosecutor from the Seoul Central Prosecutors’ Office said on Wednesday, adding that it was planning to request Lee as a witness in the preparatory session to be held at the Seoul Central District Court.

The same day, Lee’s father appeared on a radio program to reiterate that his son would testify in the case.

“My son came to Korea about a month ago and he will attend [the preparatory session] as a witness,” he said. “We want the case closed this time so that we can finally be free from it.”  [Joong Ang Ilbo]

You can read the rest at the link and you can read more about this case at this prior posting.  Basically this whole case comes down to incompetence in the Korean judicial system to let these two go free in the first place.  This was a brutal murder that the family deserves justice for.

I always wondered if the various tombs in South Korea still had cultural relics left in them and apparently some of them still do:

Authorities said Tuesday that they had rounded up four people who illegally excavated two ancient burial sites in Gyeongsan, North Gyeongsang.

According to the Gyeongsan Police Precinct, those arrested include a 65-year-old antique dealer surnamed Park, who is alleged to have stolen artifacts from the two graves. They are questioning three others employed by Park for the project.

“We suspect that they began digging near the burial sites in January last year to make a hole large enough for a man to crawl in,” said a police officer. “They dug the hole gradually at night over two months.”

Police added that the burial mounds were surrounded by dense woods before being recently refurbished.

Investigators confiscated 38 artifacts from the graves, including golden earrings, silver swords, crowns and belts, though they believe the suspects made away with more artifacts.  [Joong Ang Ilbo]

You can read the rest at the link.