▲ Malicious comments
The Supreme Court has ruled that a netizen who left a comment calling Shin Dae-chul, the guitarist of the band Sinawe, a "punk" after he publicly declared his support for then-presidential candidate Lee Jae-myung ahead of the 2022 presidential election cannot be punished for the crime of insult.
According to the legal community today, Supreme Court Division 2 (Presiding Justice Kwon Young-jun) recently reversed the lower court's ruling, which had sentenced a defendant identified as Kim to a 500,000 won fine on insult charges, and sent the case back to the Jeju District Court.
Kim was put on trial for insulting Shin after posting a comment on an internet news article in February 2022 regarding Shin's public declaration of support for then-presidential candidate Lee Jae-myung, writing, "Does a punk supporting a punk even make the news?"
The first and second-instance courts found Kim guilty of insult and sentenced him to a fine of 500,000 won.
They considered the expression "punk"—a vulgar term used to refer to a beggar or someone of base behavior who constantly commits misdeeds—to be an abstract judgment or expression of contempt capable of lowering social evaluation.
However, the Supreme Court overturned the decision with a not-guilty intent, stating that the comment in question "is difficult to be seen as a hateful expression that seriously infringes upon an individual's personal rights or inflicts humiliation to the extent of destroying the counterpart's character."
Considering the overall context of the comment, the method of expression, its meaning, Shin's status as a public figure, and the nature of internet news comment sections as a public forum for political discourse, the Court noted that "it appears closer to a somewhat unrefined expression intended to convey the defendant's negative or critical opinion or emotion."
The Supreme Court added, "It is necessary to exercise caution in applying the yardstick of the crime of insult and exercising the state's penal power to this level of expression."
An official from the Supreme Court explained, "This reaffirms the existing legal doctrine that rude expressions that displease others, or minor levels of abstract expressions and curses expressing negative or critical opinions, do not constitute the elements of the crime of insult unless they are hateful curses that seriously infringe upon personal rights or inflict humiliation."
(Photo: Yonhap News)
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