A man in his 60s has received a final 15-year prison sentence for fatally stabbing an acquaintance who lived with him, after a quarrel over the man's drunken noise.
The first panel of the Supreme Court, with Justice Ma Yong-ju as the presiding judge on the case, recently upheld the lower court ruling that sentenced the defendant, identified as A, to 15 years in prison on a murder charge, according to legal circles on the 21st.
A was indicted on charges of stabbing a 59-year-old man, identified as B, in the abdomen at his home in Gunsan, Jeonbuk State, at about 12:23 a.m. on Dec. 4 last year, killing him. The two had known each other for about 30 years, and B, who had no fixed address, had been living at A's home for about four months before the incident, investigators found.
A had been unhappy that B regularly shouted or sang loudly while drunk, prompting repeated noise complaints from neighbors. On the day of the incident, when a drunken B began shouting, A cited the neighbors' complaints and told him to keep quiet. The two then got into an argument, and when A tried to hit B with a clothes-rack pole about one meter long, B took it away and struck A once in the chest. A then fetched a sashimi knife from the kitchen table and stabbed B deeply in the left abdomen. Immediately after the attack, A called the emergency number 119 and described what had happened and the victim's condition. B was taken to a hospital but died at about 1:26 a.m. the same day from bleeding caused by the abdominal stab wound.
The trial and appellate courts both sentenced A to 15 years in prison. The trial court found that intent to kill was established given the weapon used, the part of the body attacked and the depth of the wound. It did, however, take into account as mitigating factors that the crime was impulsive and that A called 119 immediately afterward. Because A denied intent to kill during the investigation, the court found it difficult to treat the case as a voluntary surrender on the murder charge.
The Supreme Court upheld that reasoning. It rejected the argument that the 119 call made immediately after the attack should be recognized as a voluntary surrender warranting a reduced sentence. As for A's claims that the arrest in the act was unlawful and that the prosecutor abused the power to indict, the court found these were not valid grounds for appeal because they were raised for the first time at the final appeal after not being at issue in the appellate trial. "Considering the various sentencing factors, it cannot be said that the appellate court's decision to uphold the trial court's sentence of 15 years in prison was grossly unjust," the Supreme Court said.