Supreme Court: "If the forged part of a document is manipulated again, it is not the crime of private document forgery"

[Asia Economy Reporter Kim Hyung-min] The Supreme Court has ruled that even if a document is forged, if the forged part was already manipulated, it does not constitute the crime of falsifying a private document.

The Supreme Court's First Division (Presiding Justice Kwon Soon-il) overturned the lower court's guilty verdict in the appeal trial of Mr. A, who was charged with falsifying a private document, and on the 18th announced that it sent the case back to the Seoul Central District Court with a partial acquittal.

The court stated, "In the crime of falsifying a private document, 'falsification' means making changes to the content of a genuinely established document to create new evidentiary power," and added, "Even if a part of the document's content that was already falsified is changed again without authorization, the crime of falsifying a private document does not apply."

Mr. A was prosecuted on charges of forging documents by erasing the actual name in the 'recipient' field of tax invoices received from clients in 2002 and 2017, writing his own name, and then deleting it again.

The first trial court recognized Mr. A's charges as guilty and sentenced him to 1 year and 3 months in prison.

The second trial court also upheld the first trial's ruling, judging that Mr. A's unauthorized alteration of the recipient's name to something different from the fact caused a "risk of damaging the public trust of the tax invoice," deeming it illegal falsification.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.