Preparing your views on evidence and your witnesses before the first hearing

Once you have inspected and copied the record, start by keeping the list of evidence beside you and marking each item one by one.

• Check the date, time and courtroom number on the summons and clear your schedule for that day.
• Mark each number on the prosecutor's list of evidence as "admit," "dispute" or "unsure." Read the records containing your own statements line by line to see whether they match what you actually said.
• List possible witnesses who support your account, and write one line on what each of them saw or heard directly.
• Gather the documents you will submit, such as chat records, receipts and photos, and keep originals and copies separate.
• On the day of the hearing, bring your ID, arrive early and check where your case falls in the day's order on the board outside the courtroom.

If the prosecutor and the defendant consent to a document or item being used as evidence and the court accepts it as genuine, it becomes evidence (Criminal Procedure Act (형사소송법) Article 318). Consent means "you may decide on the basis of this evidence," so if you carelessly consent to a document containing untrue statements, its contents become material for the judgment as they stand.

Your own suspect interrogation record (피의자신문조서) prepared by the police only becomes evidence if you accept its contents in court (Article 312(3)). If you do not consent to a record of someone else's statement, as a rule it only becomes evidence if that person appears in court, testifies that they said what is in the record, and you get a chance to cross-examine them (same article, (4)). So not consenting leads directly to witness examination.

If you admit all the charged facts, you usually consent to all the evidence and focus on sentencing materials. If you have nothing to dispute but refuse consent to the victim's statement record and make the victim come to court again, it is a burden on the victim and may not look good at sentencing.

If you dispute the charges, refuse consent only to the statements related to the points you dispute. If you admit only part, set out in your written opinion which facts you admit and which you dispute, so the court is not confused.

After the examination of evidence, the prosecutor and the defense lawyer may question the defendant about the charged facts and mitigating circumstances (Article 296-2), and at the end the defendant gives a final statement in person (Article 303). The final statement does not need to be long. If you prepare two or three sentences in advance about your thoughts on the victim and your plans, you will not be lost for words in court. Submit your own documents as copies with a list of evidence attached, and bring the originals to court so the judges can check them.

The defense can also call witnesses (Article 294). The side that called the witness asks questions first, and the other side asks afterwards (Article 161-2). Prepare your questions in advance and build them around what the witness experienced directly.

Do not tell witnesses what to answer or have them memorise answers. If they say something different from what they remember, it raises perjury issues, and they are easily shaken in cross-examination. It is safer to tell them only roughly when they need to come to court and what the case is about. In cases with many issues, the court may hold a pretrial preparation hearing (공판준비기일) to sort out evidence and witnesses in advance, and evidence not applied for at that point may be hard to submit later (Articles 266-7 and 266-13).

We take the record, decide our position on every item on the list of evidence, and set out the statements to be disputed and our grounds in a written opinion. If witness examination is needed, we prepare the questions and identify in advance the contradictions to raise in cross-examination. If we handled your case from the investigation stage, we compare against the questioning records from that time to see where statements changed.