“I cannot figure out why they are keeping me here. I want a lie detector test.... When they were investigating me, I kept saying that I didn’t do it. But the prosecutor cornered me and said that if I kept on making a scene, a new crime might appear out of thin air. I was exhausted and thought, ‘Well, this is it,’ so I told them I did it.”

A letter was sent on Feb. 28, 2008, from the Suwon Detention Center. A homeless runaway surnamed Cho, then 16 years old, had mailed it to Kim Tae-jin of the Gyeonggi Youth Counseling and Support Center.

Cho had been arrested on Jan. 30, 2008, along with four other homeless friends around the same age, on charges of injury resulting in death. The five were accused of kidnapping a homeless girl whom they believed had stolen 20,000 Won ($17), taking her to a Suwon high school and beating her, which led to her death. At the time, the investigation was under the direction of prosecutor Park Jae-hyeong of the Suwon District Prosecutor’s Office Violent Crime Department, then headed by chief prosecutor Kim Hak-seok.

During the first trial, Cho and her friends were sentenced to two to four years in prison, along with two other defendants, including a 31-year-old named Jeong, who was arrested as the principal offender. While serving one year in the Yeongdeungpo Detention Center, they were found not guilty during an appeal trial in January 2009 and released.

The Supreme Court’s First Division, presided over by Justice Kim Nung-hwan, made a final confirmation of their acquittal on Thursday.

“While they did confess, they have consistently denied culpability since the first trial,” said the court, citing the reasoning behind their verdict. “They appear to have confessed during the investigation, during which they were unable to receive assistance from family members or guardians, because they were under the misunderstanding that the other accused individuals had already confessed, or because they had been told by prosecutors that they might receive better treatment if they confessed.”

“In light of these factors, the confession obtained by prosecutors is of questionable credibility,” the court said.

The verdict came exactly two years and six months after Cho and the others had tearfully proclaimed their innocence.

Prosecutors’ Investigation Nabs the Wrong Culprits

The only evidence produced by prosecutors to support the charges against Cho and the other defendants consisted of their interrogation statements. At the time, the prosecutors issued a press release.

The prosecutors boasted, “During the investigation of the teenagers, we observed legal procedure and made video recordings of the entire process.”

During the first trial, however, the prosecutors only presented the statements by Cho and the other defendants without submitting the video records. Beginning in the appeal trial, their attorney submitted as evidence the prosecutors’ video recording device that had not appeared in the first trial. In the process, they gave a full picture of the prosecutors’ coercive investigation, including the methods used to extract confessions, the selectiveness of investigation methods, and the omission of unfavorable statements.

The video footage shows a prosecutor guiding the defendants’ statements. When Cho fails to give an adequate description of the crime scene, which she had never actually visited, a prosecutor shows her a picture and provides detailed circumstances and information regarding the incident.

“I am going to show you the picture, so try to think back,” the prosecutor said in the video. “This is what the school door looked like. Where did you go?”

However, the process depicted in the video footage was not included in the actual statements.

Cho and the other defendants also consistently denied involvement in the crime throughout the investigation. One defendant, a boy surnamed Kim who was 16 at the time, can be seen telling the investigator, “I cannot say I did something I did not do. And you said there is a lie detector. Use it. This is so unfair, I can’t believe it.”

However, also prosecutors left this out of the statement.

“It was really tough matching my story to the prosecutors’ demands,” said Cho.

“The investigator said that the other friends had all confessed, and that I would get a heavier punishment if I was the only one who didn’t,” said another accused friend, a 19-year-old surnamed Choe. “So I gave in, and then I found out that all my friends had heard the exact same thing.”

A Wound That Will Never Heal

Another one of the accused teenagers, an 18-year-old identified by the surname Kang, shed tears as she met with a Hankyoreh reporter on Thursday. Kang, who ran away from home in her second year of middle school while living with her father after her parents’ divorce, said, “When my father came to visit, he still believed in me, and then he died last December,” before seeing her acquitted.

“If you look at the motivation and circumstances that led to the confessions of these young people who had lost their protective membrane due to broken homes, you can see that they had no guardian to protect them, or even legal assistance, in the face of these investigators,” said Park Jun-yeong, a court-appointed attorney who handled the case from the beginning. “Meanwhile, the prosecutors extracted false confessions by using gangster-style investigation tactics against them.”

Please direct questions or comments to [englishhani@hani.co.kr]