[Herald DB]
[Herald DB]

South Korea's Supreme Court has ruled that calling a fellow hospital patient "human trash" does not constitute criminal insult.

According to legal sources, the Supreme Court's Second Division, presided over by Justice Park Young-jae, on Aug. 12 overturned the portion of the lower court's ruling related to the insult charge against a 67-year-old YouTuber, identified only as A, who had been indicted on charges of insult and defamation, and sent the insult portion of the case back to the Daegu District Court. The lower court had sentenced A to eight months in prison with a two-year suspended sentence.

On Oct. 6, 2023, A got into an argument with a fellow patient — a woman in her 20s — in a hospital ward over the room lights and a shared telephone. The dispute began when the woman turned off the ward lights, saying the glare bothered her while she lay in bed using her phone, and unplugged the shared telephone to charge her personal device. When she refused to acknowledge A's objections, A called her "human trash" in front of other patients, leading to the insult charge.

Separately, A also faced defamation charges over a banner he posted in 2021 on a road near Seoul Detention Center falsely claiming that police officers and prison guards had accepted bribes to allow inmates to run illegal businesses, damaging the reputations of the civil servants involved.

The first court found A guilty on all charges and sentenced him to 10 months in prison, suspended for two years, along with 120 hours of community service. The appellate court upheld the guilty verdict but partially accepted arguments that the sentence was excessive, reducing it to eight months with a two-year suspension.

The Supreme Court, however, found that the insult charge stemming from the "human trash" remark could not stand.

The court reaffirmed the legal principle that an expression does not meet the threshold for criminal insult if it is merely rude or discourteous enough to cause discomfort, or amounts to a mild abstract expression or epithet — rather than a hateful slur so degrading as to seriously violate a person's dignity or destroy their sense of self-worth.


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