An appeals court acquitted Dr. Yang Seung-o and others, who were indicted on charges of violating the Public Official Election Act after raising allegations of draft-dodging involving the late former Seoul Mayor Park Won-soon's son, Park Ju-shin. A lower court's 2016 ruling that imposed a fine was overturned about 10 years later.
The Seoul High Court's Criminal Division 6-3 (High Court Judges Lee Ye-seul, Jeong Jae-o, and Choi Eun-jeong) on the 4th overturned the lower court's ruling that fined Yang 15 million won and found him not guilty. Five other defendants who were tried together were also acquitted of all election law violations, including announcing false information and slandering a candidate. However, one defendant was convicted only of "distributing documents by an unlawful method" and was fined 700,000 won.
The case began with Park's military service assessment. Park entered the Air Force training center in Aug. 2011 but returned home in September that year complaining of thigh pain. After a reexamination, he was assigned to public service for a diagnosis of herniated disc. Starting in Jan. 2012, allegations of draft-dodging surfaced, and in February that year Park underwent a public physical examination at Severance Hospital and had an MRI scan.
At the time, Dr. Yang, then chief of the nuclear medicine department at the Dongnam Institute of Radiological and Medical Sciences, and others repeatedly raised suspicions that "the MRI was switched," and filed a complaint accusing Park of violating the Military Service Act, but prosecutors cleared Park of wrongdoing.
Prosecutors, viewing that Yang and others spread false information to the effect that "Park committed draft-dodging" to try to cause former Mayor Park to lose in the June 2014 local elections (violation of the Public Official Election Act), indicted them without detention.
In Feb. 2016, the first trial court found that "no proxy was involved in the MRI process, and it is clear that the public verification at Severance Hospital was conducted by Park himself," and ruled that the draft-dodging allegations were not true. The court also rejected the defendants' claim that the person in the scan images had different physical characteristics from Park.
The appeals court, however, reached a different conclusion. The appellate panel noted that "it is highly possible that Yang and others believed their suspicions to be true and that the suspicions had not been resolved." It particularly pointed out that although the public examination was meant to dispel draft-dodging suspicions, the individuals who raised the allegations were not allowed to participate in the process, and ruled, "Given that the MRI disclosure proceeded while the accusers were excluded, it is difficult to verify whether the subject in the scan data is Park Ju-shin."
The court also found that "until the investigation and trial definitively established whether a proxy was involved, the defendants appeared to have room to argue that the existing suspicions had not been resolved." It added, "Considering these circumstances as a whole, the mere facts that the defendants could not directly verify the person in the scan data and could not sufficiently secure additional materials do not, by themselves, support applying the charges of announcing false information or slandering a candidate."