A girl pays her respects as she shows a be aware close to the doorway to a feminine toilet at Sindang station in Seoul on Sept. 19, 2022. Seoul Metro worker Jeon Joo-hwan was sentenced Tuesday for stabbing his colleague to demise within the metro station’s ladies’s public bathroom the day earlier than a court docket was set to condemn him on expenses of stalking her.

Anthony Wallace/AFP/Getty Photos

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Anthony Wallace/AFP/Getty Photos

A girl pays her respects as she shows a be aware close to the doorway to a feminine toilet at Sindang station in Seoul on Sept. 19, 2022. Seoul Metro worker Jeon Joo-hwan was sentenced Tuesday for stabbing his colleague to demise within the metro station’s ladies’s public bathroom the day earlier than a court docket was set to condemn him on expenses of stalking her.

Anthony Wallace/AFP/Getty Photos

SEOUL —A South Korean court docket sentenced a person to 40 years in jail on Tuesday for stabbing a feminine colleague to demise in a Seoul subway station — an act the court docket deemed “revenge homicide.”

The person, 31-year-old Jeon Joo-hwan, despatched the sufferer undesirable textual content messages, then threatened her with movies he filmed with a hidden digicam at their office restroom.

In 2021 — two years and 350 textual content messages after his preliminary threats — the lady reported Jeon to the police and filed a felony grievance. He was charged with stalking. The day earlier than his sentencing was due on these expenses, he snuck into the ladies’s lavatory at Seoul’s Sindang metro station, carrying a disposable hair cap, waited for her to come back in, and stabbed her to demise.

Jeon and his sufferer, a 28-year-old lady who has not been named, had been each employed by the Seoul Metro Company. The killing on the subway station in central Seoul final September shocked South Korea, although it was not the primary such killing. Girls in recent times have demanded security in public areas and workplaces from threats like unlawful filming, gender-based hate crime and sexual abuse.

The calls have led to some significant achievements. An anti-stalking regulation handed the congress in 2021, greater than 20 years after the primary such invoice was proposed. New amendments to legal guidelines on sexual violence have criminalized filming or distributing movies and footage of somebody in opposition to their will.

The sufferer relied on these legal guidelines when she filed a felony grievance accusing Jeon of committing crimes the legal guidelines punish. However they failed to guard her life.

After she filed the felony grievance in opposition to Jeon, police sought to detain him, however a court docket denied an arrest warrant, citing low threat of destroying proof or fleeing. Jeon continued sending threats to the sufferer, demanding settlement of felony expenses.

Following her demise, consultants identified shortfalls in South Korea’s present anti-stalking regulation, which narrowly defines legally acknowledged stalking and features a clause that prohibits prosecuting a perpetrator in opposition to the sufferer’s objection.

Kim Jeong-hye, a researcher on the Korean Girls’s Improvement Institute, mentioned in a discussion board final October that the clause “displays the concept that stalking happens within the realm of personal life and trivializes the crime.” Kim additionally referred to as for extra strong safety of stalking victims, contemplating that the crime typically occurs in repeated situations over an prolonged time period.

In accordance with police information, almost 30,000 stories had been filed for stalking within the first 12 months of the anti-stalking regulation’s implementation. Police sought arrest warrants for 377 amongst 7,100 perpetrators apprehended in that interval. Of these indicted, 27% had been sentenced to jail. Earlier than his sentencing on Tuesday, Jeon was already serving a 9-year sentence ensuing from the sufferer’s unique expenses of unlawful filming and stalking.

After the killing final September, folks mourned the sufferer, laying flowers and Submit-it notes at a makeshift shrine outdoors the Sindang station lavatory. Subsequent to a plaque touting town authorities’s marketing campaign for “Girls-friendly Seoul,” one be aware learn, “What number of extra should die?”