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99 Case 6 A Widower Seeks Private Settlement Ms. Chŏng (Yŏngch’ŏn, Kyŏngsang Province, 1889) D uring the Chosŏn dynasty, a death incident was supposed to be immediately reported to the local authorities, so that they could carry out a thorough investigation to meet a timely postmortem procedure.1 However, it is not uncommon to find a death case that was not reported to the office but instead settled between the families of the victim and the offender. While the government discouraged excessive legal suits for trivial matters that could be resolved by the conflicting parties,2 it criticized the private settlement (sahwa) of death incidents as an immoral practice and also strictly controlled sahwa for any serious incidents, especially homicide. Nevertheless, as cases 4 and 8 illustrate, toward the end of the dynasty local people frequently chose to settle death cases through private negotiations rather than going to court. So why did people choose an illegal option when lawful means were available? Although people understood their legal rights and used the judicial process to address their problems, going through official channels required enormous mental, physical, and material efforts. For example, various expenses related to an autopsy could be quite a burden for families of the dead, who also had to be involved in a series of testimonies that were sometimes elicited by the use of torture.3 In addition, as we see from all the cases introduced in this book, nearly everyone in the village was called for public testimonies when a death case occurred. The village head and administrators were held particularly responsible, since they observed and supervised village matters. When a death case was filed, it thus involved not just the families concerned, but the entire community. 100 | Case 6 On the one hand, the Confucian government viewed abandoning the investigation of a family member’s death (especially that of a parent) as immoral and unfilial. There were many occasions when the Chosŏn government forgave and even praised a person who had taken the life of the killer of his or her parent, sibling, or spouse, even deeming such revenge a virtuous act. On the other hand, it is not surprising that private settlement was an obvious choice for ordinary people, as long as the incident was successfully covered up and no further problems ensued. Yet even though families negotiating a wrongful death hoped to hide it completely, quite a number of legal cases reveal that such efforts often failed to bear fruit. This particular case, the death of Ms. Chŏng in 1889, is an example of what could happen when a private settlement between the family of a victim, an offender, and the villagers was later discovered and reported to the local magistrate.4 Pak Kyŏng-ju, witnessing his wife Ms. Chŏng’s death and knowing of her last wish that he avenge her, carried her body to the offender Yang Su-gŭn’s house, a practice quite prevalent among local people at that time.5 In cases when someone was beaten and hurt, Chosŏn law prescribed that an offender was responsible for all medical expenses. If the victim died within a certain period set by the court, the offender was punishable for homicide; if the victim died after the set time, the offender was prosecuted on the charge of assault instead.6 The actual cause of Ms. Chŏng’s death was determined to have been kicking that led to a miscarriage. “Causing a miscarriage” means, according to the law, “that the child dies within the period of responsibility and that the fetus is more than ninety days old and that the child is formed. [Only under such circumstances shall the offenders] be punished.”7 The offender was subject to “eighty strokes of beating with a heavy stick and penal servitude for two years.”8 Rather than going to court, a victim’s family often attempted to seize monetary compensation for the death by threatening the offender. In this case Pak Kyŏng-ju, a poor peddler who was always in need of money, forgot his wife’s last wish and agreed on a settlement that would grant him a deed to some fields. The mediators of the negotiation between Pak and Yang were village elders and administrators who seem to have been quite familiar with such a practice and somehow tried to take advantage of it. Despite the parties’ wish to conceal the event...

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