Word: koreanness
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...government's move follows a flurry of renewed interest in the crime in popular culture. In September, a blockbuster film that dramatized the murder, The Case of the Itaewon Homicide, swept South Korea. That same month, a South Korean television crew discovered Patterson was living in Sunnyvale after the U.S. government failed to locate him following a 2005 request for judicial assistance from Seoul. "After we concluded that [the television crew's] finding was true, we decided to reopen the case," says Oh Se In, a Seoul city prosecutor acting as a spokesman for the case. Lee, the other defendant...
...some South Koreans, it's one step toward a victory against a series of alleged crimes by American servicemen and their relatives over the past 40 years - and the law that they say goes easy on them. "We've seen in this case that SOFA's protection range is too broad," says Park Kyung Soo, an activist at the National Campaign for the Eradication of Crimes by U.S. Troops in Korea, a nonprofit organization in Seoul. "It restricts the right to continuous detention before prosecution, and whenever people protected by SOFA go to court, an American representative has to accompany...
...Despite the government's good relations with Washington, a large sector of South Korean society has had a long and rocky relationship with American influence, with skepticism many scholars attribute to decades of occupation by foreign powers last century. In 2002, protests erupted across the country after two American soldiers were acquitted by a U.S. military court for running over and killing two teenage girls north of Seoul in their armored vehicle; again, critics derided stipulations in the SOFA treaty that kept the soldiers from being tried in South Korean courts. In 2008, more heated demonstrations broke out in Seoul...
...Still, others contend the SOFA treaty does not hinder investigations to the extent antimilitary activists and the South Korean media claim. "We've always had jurisdiction over these kinds of crimes when the victim is Korean," says Oh, the prosecution's spokesman. "We've only had a few restrictions on procedural matters, which is not a big deal." Indeed, supporters point out that the terms of the treaty are far more favorable to South Korea than, for example, the terms of a similar treaty Japan signed with the U.S. in 1960. In that country, the U.S. military can hold suspected...
...Many think the government made a wise move in reopening the case, and that resolving the Itaewon Burger King murder will help heal old scars between American military bases and the South Korean residents living around them. But Park, the activist, asserts that a new trial will only be the first step in a struggle to revise the treaty that could take decades. "It'll certainly loosen tensions, but only a little bit," Park says. And without a conviction, many South Koreans will continue to harbor anger over what they believe was the great solvable murder that went unsolved...