It is a good day for Lee Jae-myung who many consider the front runner to be the next president of Korea:
An appeals court on Wednesday acquitted opposition leader Lee Jae-myung of lying as a presidential candidate during the 2022 election, overturning a lower court’s sentence of a suspended prison term.
The decision by the Seoul High Court removed a major legal hurdle for Lee, as a suspended prison term, if finalized, would have stripped him of his parliamentary seat and barred him from running in the next presidential election.
The appellate ruling can still be overturned by the Supreme Court.
First of all the law to prosecute politicians for lying seems like one that can be easily weaponized by the political opposition. With that said here is what Lee was accused of lying about:
During the initial trial, the opposition leader was found guilty of lying during a media interview in December 2021 that he did not play golf with the late Kim Moon-ki, a former executive of Seongnam Development Corp., which was behind a corruption-ridden development project in Seongnam, south of Seoul, when Lee was the city’s mayor.
Lee was also found guilty of lying during a parliamentary audit of the Gyeonggi provincial government in October 2021 that he was under pressure from the land ministry to rezone the former site of the Korea Food Research Institute in Seongnam.
The site was later developed into apartment complexes by a private developer, and allegations were raised that Lee rezoned the land to give preferential treatment to the company.
In November, the lower court sentenced Lee to one year in prison, suspended for two years, for making false statements in violation of the Public Official Election Act.
In reversing that decision, however, the Seoul High Court said none of the four remarks Lee made during the campaign about allegedly not knowing Kim qualified as false statements. That included the remark about golf.
“He cannot be considered to have lied that they did not play golf, and it is difficult to recognize the remark as false,” the appeals court said.
On the alleged pressure from the land ministry, the court acknowledged that Lee “came under pressure from various angles.”
“His remark that he was threatened with charges of dereliction of duty could be an exaggerated expression of the considerable pressure he felt at the time, but it is difficult to recognize as false,” the court said.
From this article to me it is unclear whether he played golf with Kim Moon-ki and instead of lying about the pressure from the land ministry the appeals court believes he was just exaggerating. That is the area of this law that can be easily weaponized. Politicians exaggerate and bend the truth all the time. Should they be prosecuted everytime they do this?
