So-called Wang-jaesan decision (2013do2511) was declared by ‘Korean Supreme Court’ (hereafter ‘KSC’) in July, 2013. The decision had a lot of important substantial and procedural issues in criminal spheres. However, what I have tried to concentrate in this review are only two issues, the one is the issue of the authenticity of electronic evidence (or digital evidence), the other is the issue of the application of ‘the Korean version hearsay rule’ (hereafter ‘KHR’) of the electronic evidence. The methodology of this review is the comparative analysis of the Wang-jaesan decision from the perspective of Federal Rules of Evidence (hereafter ‘FRE’). In Wang-jaesan decision KSC defined the concept of integrity of electronic evidence as ‘the contents of the digital data have not been altered in any manner from the moment that were seized’ or ‘that evidence wasn’t changed after it was captured or collected.’ The meaning of this concept is different from the meaning of the traditional ‘exactness of utterances’(成立의 眞正) of article 312, 312 of KHR. That concept was made from the unique Korean modern legal history. However, it cannot deal with so many hard cases properly. Therefore I suggest in chapter Ⅰ, Ⅱ, Ⅲ, Ⅳ that We Korean legal scholars and practitioners should adopt the concept of authentication something like FRE, even though Korean Criminal Procedure Law does not have clear stipulations about it. In chapter Ⅴ, Ⅵ I did comparing analyses about the applications of KHR by KSC since 1990’s up to the 2010’s. I found that KSC has adopted enormously FRE when there were no clear stipulations in Korean Criminal Procedure Law. This is a kind of interesting phenomenon which deserves to be analyzed from the perspective of comparative law and global legal transplant of evidence rule.

The hearsay rule was introduced into the Criminal Procedure Law by the Act No. 705, Sep. 1, 1961 in Korea. Any document which contains statements in place of the statements made at the preparatory hearing or at the public trial shall not be admitted as evidence of guilt except as provided by a few articles of the Criminal Procedure Law(§310-2). The investigation report which contains statements of witnesses prepared by the public prosecutors or by the judicial police officers may be introduced into evidence if the genuineness thereof is established by the person who made original statements at the preparatory hearing or at the public trial(§312 (1), §313 (1)). If the witnesses are unable to be present or to testify at the preparatory hearing or at the public trial because of death, sickness, residing abroad or other reasons, the recorded statements of witnesses are not excluded by the hearsay rule(§314). And the probative value of evidence shall be left to the discretion of the judges(§308). Recently the innovative reformation of trial has been the hottest issue and the Criminal Procedure Law is amended by the Act No. Apr. 30, 2007. During that turmoil the Supreme Court ruled that even though the admissibility of recorded statements of witnesses is accepted on the basis of agreement between adversarial parties(§318), the credibility of those statements is extremely restricted in the case the confrontation right of the defendant is limited. The witness-investigation report may have probative values when the recorded statements are so accurate that they are self-evident or if other evidences collaborate the reliability of the recorded statements.