Min Mun-gi

Min Mun-gi (閔文基, 1916 – 5 May 2003) was a South Korean jurist.¹ From September 1969 to August 1980, he served as a Justice of the Supreme Court of South Korea. His family seat was Yeoheung.

Life

He was born in Sinchon County, Hwanghae Province. In 1938 he graduated from the Keijo Law School, and in 1942 he passed the judicial section of the Japanese higher civil service examination and was then appointed as a prosecutor. In 1945 he passed the Japanese practical bar examination. After liberation, Min was appointed to the prosecution service and became head of the Prosecutor's Office Division of the Ministry of Justice, but he resigned because he did not get along with the Director of the Public Prosecutor's Office.² He then was appointed as a judge, and served as president of the Gwangju High Court and the Seoul High Court, among other posts. In September 1969, he was appointed as a Justice of the Supreme Court of South Korea by President Park Chung-hee.

In the mid-1960s, while serving as president of the Gwangju High Court, he refused to attend a National Assembly parliamentary audit, claiming he could not read an oath that contained content not found in any law, such as "I consider it an honor to be audited."³ In 1977, in a case disputing the scope of appeals in small claims cases, he issued a minority opinion joined by only one other justice against fifteen. In it, he compared the situation of the time to a bird, saying: "A single swallow cannot bring about spring right away, but the spring it brings, the young spring, will surely come. This is the reason why I dare to uphold the minority opinion." This drew attention, and he came to be known as the "poet judge."⁴ In another case, a man named Kim Yeong-jun (20), who had been sentenced to six months in prison for violence and released on 1 November 1975, then committed robbery-murder, rape-homicide, theft, and eleven robberies over 27 days beginning 15 December, killing two people. When the Supreme Court en banc held a sentencing hearing on 24 February 1977, the majority of twelve justices held that "in view of the nature of the crimes, the death penalty must be imposed." Min, however, along with Kim Yun-haeng, Lim Hang-jun, and Lee Il-gyu, issued a minority opinion opposing the death penalty. He argued that "the purpose of punishment does not lie in retribution, and in particular, this defendant was separated from his family, lived in an orphanage, and dropped out of fourth grade in elementary school, never receiving proper education or guidance from the state, society, or family," and that "it is appropriate to give a life sentence rather than the extreme penalty, and to devote oneself to correction and rehabilitation."⁵ In the appellate trial of Kim Jae-gyu and others, who had assassinated President Park Chung-hee, he, along with five other justices, presented a minority opinion rejecting a finding of murder for the purpose of insurrection, reasoning that "there is insufficient evidence to determine whether the killing of a natural person holding the office of president was carried out with the purpose of disrupting the constitutional order." About seven months remained before his mandatory retirement, but in August 1980 he left his post as a justice of the Supreme Court together with five other justices who had also presented minority opinions. After leaving the Supreme Court, from 1984 he worked as a notary at the Hapdong Law Office in Incheon, but from 2002 he withdrew to his home due to old age illness, and he died on 5 May 2003.

In April 1972, while serving as a Supreme Court justice, he ruled to reverse and remand a lower court's guilty verdict in a case in which the defendant had been prosecuted without a complaint. Although the Special Act on the Punishment of Specific Crimes and the Customs Act specified, as special provisions for aggravated punishment of tax evasion and customs violations, that "a complaint is not required," unlike the Tax Offense Punishment Act, which permits punishment only upon a complaint from the head of a tax office. This caused controversy in legal circles.⁷

Footnotes

Footnotes

1. [1] ↩

2. 1993년 10월 26일자 한겨레 ↩

3. [2] ↩

4. [3] ↩

5. [4] ↩

6. [5] ↩

7. 동아일보 1972년 4월 29일 ↩