Why Do Koreans Claim They Are Powerless to Prosecute GI Criminals?

It looks like the S&S is milking the Itaewon Pellet Gun Bandits story for all its worth now:

SEOUL — It was a chilly Saturday night in early March when the first round of shots came, just loud enough to draw attention but too fleeting to cause panic among the late-night revelers in Itaewon, perhaps the city’s most infamous party district.
Kim Gi-wan, 26, had just said goodbye to his friends and was walking down the street when he heard them in quick succession. People nearby looked around in surprise, but nobody screamed. No one dove for cover or even stopped walking.
The idea of an intentional shooting in a country where gun ownership is virtually nonexistent was so unthinkable that most people just shrugged off the noise, including Kim.

“I thought maybe there was a military exercise going on,” said the salesman, who works at an Itaewon hip-hop clothing store that advertises “big sizes” for foreigners. Even though the sprawling U.S. Army Garrison Yongsan was just a short walk away, he had never heard shots from the base, so he assumed South Korean troops were training nearby.
A second round of fire followed further down the street, out of Kim’s hearing. Police quickly got an emergency call from a panicked man who claimed foreigners were shooting at him.
What followed was a commander’s nightmare — a string of worsening errors that made front-page news for days. It epitomized the microscope that all U.S. servicemembers, many still in their teens or early 20s and away from home for the first time, live under in South Korea.
As it turned out, there were no real bullets, just plastic pellets shot into a crowd from a car carrying three soldiers; one said it was all “for fun.” A military official called it “horseplay that led to greater consequences.”
But in a country where any misconduct by American troops is big news, things went downhill fast with a series of bad decisions.When it was over, one soldier underwent chest surgery to remove a bullet fired by a South Korean police officer. And South Koreans were left to chew on the latest in a decades-long string of offenses by U.S. troops that many feel show disdain for their country and their powerlessness to prosecute such cases. [Stars and Stripes]

You can read the rest at the link but there is really nothing new in the article. It just provides a good summary of what happened in one article. I do wish though the S&S would confront people who claim Korea is powerless to prosecute such cases despite the fact the few GIs who do commit crimes like the idiots in this article are prosecuted and punished by Korean courts.