2020년 형법 중요판례평석 - 대법원 전원합의체 판결을 중심으로 -

Abstract

This paper reviews and analyses several important criminal judgements delivered by Korean Supreme Court in 2019. In the 2020 Supreme Court’s criminal ruling, there were a total of 10 cases of consensus. Among them, eight cases of consensus were analyzed in this article, except for the ruling on violations of the Public Official Election Act and two rulings on issues in the field of criminal procedure law. What was unusual was four out of eight cases in which the interpretation of “a person who handles other people’s affairs”, the act of breach of trust, became an issue. These precedents are meaningful in that they continue the trend of the Supreme Court’s recent ruling that refrained from intervening in the state’s penal right to default on civil debt and denied the establishment of breach of trust in relation to the double disposition of property. The other four rulings deal with the meaning of “perblicly”, a component of defamation crime, and the meaning of “fraud” in crime of ‘intercourse by deception’, “forgery” in crime of ‘electronic records forgery’, and “let people do something without obligation” in ‘abuse of authority on duty’ respectively. ‘The possibility of spread’ is meaningful in that it has once again dealt with issues that are constantly raised in academia and practice. The issue of the interpretation of ‘deception’ and ‘forgery’ is worthy of examination, because it is a problematic topic recently. And the issue of the interpretation and application of “let people do something without obligation” in the crime of abuse of authority should be considered because it is especially controversial in Korea’s political landscape. In this article, the judgments on the crime of breach of trust were first collected and analyzed, and the other rulings were then reviewed in order.