hankyoreh

Ji Jeong-gwan stands in front of the Seoul High Court after being acquitted of charges on June 26.

“Each of the defendants are innocent,” said Hon. Hong Dong-gi, presiding judge of the 12th criminal division at the Seoul High Court, at 2 pm on June 26. As soon as Hong announced his sentence in Room No. 403 at the courthouse, quiet applause rippled through the gallery. The people who streamed out of the courtroom congratulated Ji Jeong-gwan, 78, who had been acquitted in the retrial.

“I’m happy to be able to tell my fellow reporters that democracy is being achieved in South Korea,” Ji said.

While working as the Tokyo foreign correspondent for a French wire service in 1980, Ji was convicted of violating South Korea’s National Security Act and sentenced to seven years in prison. In Apr. 1979, at the tail end of Park Chung-hee’s military dictatorship, the police’s security headquarters announced that they had apprehended ten spies who had been attempting to rebuild the Revolutionary Unification Party under orders from North Korea.

Along with Ji, the people who were identified as spies in this affair included Lim Dong-gyu, head of general affairs at the Korea University Institute for Research on Labor and Employment; Park Hyeon-chae, a lecturer at Chungnam National University and Kyung Hee University and the author of a book called Theory of the National Economy; and Yang Jeong-gyu, managing director of a research society into modernizing South Korean agriculture.

They were put on trial for violating the National Security Act, accused of having been recruited by North Korean agents in Japan to ferret out classified information and praise North Korea. The accused were found guilty in the trial and sentenced to various prison terms, including life imprisonment.

But the only petitioner for a retrial who was around to hear the “good news” during the trial was Ji, who came over from Japan. In 2013, Ji and four other members of the alleged spy ring who had been sentenced to prison for attempting to rebuild the Revolutionary Unification Party appealed for a retrial. Of these five, Park Hyeon-chae and Kim Jae-uk had already passed away long ago. It took four years just for the court to decide to reopen the case, during which time Yang Jeong-gyu died, in 2014. Lim Dong-gyu was diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease and is hospitalized in a nursing home.

“The defendants were detained by the investigators without a warrant, and they confessed during this state of illegal detention, before the arrest warrant was issued. In light of the psychological pressure resulting from their illegal detention and the coercive situation that continued during the prosecutors’ investigation, the confessions obtained during the prosecutors’ interrogation are not admissible as evidence,” the judge wrote in his verdict.

Of course, this acquittal does not bring the legal process to an end. Even though Ji and the rest have waited 38 years since the Supreme Court confirmed their life sentences and five years since they requested a retrial, their acquittal in the retrial will only be confirmed if the prosecutors’ do not appeal the case during the next seven days.

By Kim Min-kyoung, staff reporter 　

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