법조 제75권 제3호(통권 제777호) 연구논문 - 200 - ❙Abstract❙ Issues and Reform Proposals Regarding Article 312 of the Criminal Procedure Act - The Admissibility of Accomplices' Interrogation Records and the Utilization of Video-Recorded Statements - 93) Park, Jae Sung* Following the 2020 amendment to the Criminal Procedure Act, the Supreme Court extended the doctrine previously applied to accomplices' interrogation records prepared by police officers to those prepared by public prosecutors, holding that such records are inadmissible whenever the defendant denies the truthfulness of their contents. The Court further interpreted "accomplice" to encompass counterpart-offenders, with the result that the admissibility of any investigative statement made by a person falling within that category is now determined entirely by the defendant. However, the case law applying Article 312(1) or (3) to accomplices' interrogation records—and identifying the defendant, rather than the accomplice who actually made the statement, as the party whose acknowledgment is required —exceeds the permissible bounds of textual interpretation. It also lacks interpretive consistency when compared with precedents defining the scope of "accomplice" under other provisions of the Criminal Procedure Act. Moreover, there is no reasonable basis for treating an accomplice's interrogation record differently from other witness statement records merely because the declarant is an accomplice. The most significant problem with the current case law is that, by granting the defendant the power to determine the admissibility of an accomplice's investigative statement, it denies the necessity of preserving such statements as key evidence and seriously impedes the discovery of substantive truth. In sophisticated criminal schemes—organized crime, narcotics offenses, and high-level corruption—where physical evidence is typically scarce, an accomplice's statement functions as a * Prosecutor, International Legal Policy Division, Ministry of Justice
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