Rep. Han Jeong-ae, chair of the Democratic Party's Policy Committee, on Tuesday sponsored an amendment to the Criminal Act that would remove the kinship exemption clause applied to the crimes of harboring criminals and destroying evidence. She argues that the current law is designed to excessively protect perpetrators and that this must be corrected.
Article 151 of the current Criminal Act stipulates punishment for those who harbor or help escape a person who has committed a crime punishable by a fine or heavier penalty. Article 155 of the same act stipulates punishment for destroying evidence related to another person's criminal case. However, both clauses apply a kinship exemption that spares relatives from punishment when they commit such acts for the sake of a family member.
A representative example is the recent case of Jang Yoon-gi, who murdered a high school girl he had never met in downtown Gwangju. While he was under detention for investigation, it was later revealed that his father, an active-duty police officer, had damaged and destroyed key evidence supporting Jang's sexual-crime motive. However, due to the kinship exemption clause in the Criminal Act, his father was spared punishment.
The destroyed evidence was crucial to proving Jang's charge of murder committed for the purpose of rape. The minimum statutory sentence for simple murder is five years in prison, but murder committed for the purpose of rape can only be punished by death or life imprisonment.
Han's office explained, "The legal nature of this exemption is described as 'grounds for exclusion of liability due to the lack of expectability of lawful conduct,' but considering the trends of the times and to enhance the effectiveness of investigations, urgent institutional improvement is needed."
Accordingly, Han removed the kinship exemption that had been applied to the crimes of harboring criminals and destroying evidence under the current Criminal Act. "Korea's scope of personal application for kinship-related exemptions is relatively broad compared to overseas, which favors perpetrators," Han said. "In fact, Japan does not uniformly exempt punishment for evidence destruction among relatives, but individually judges the severity of each case."
