Category: crime & punishment

Via a reader tip comes this interesting CBS News report about an English teacher murdered in Seoul back in 1988 and how her alleged killer is free back in the US:

Imagine a loved one brutally murdered in a foreign country — allegedly by another American.
Correspondent Peter Van Sant and his team have investigated the disturbing 1988 murder of Carolyn Abel, an American teacher in South Korea, and the loophole in U.S. laws at the time that mean the suspected killer may never face trial.

For writer and author Nancy Bercaw, flying to South Korea last winter reopened a painful chapter in her life: one of murder, loss and fear.

CBS News

You can read the whole thing at the link, but the suspected killer of Carolyn Abel was her boss at the English school she worked at named Kathy Patrick. Patrick was gay and supposedly was angered when Abel rejected her advances and decided to kill her. After killing her Patrick then flew home to Washington State. Since there was no extradition treaty between the US and Korea at the time, US authorities could not arrest her for murder.

Since the murder Patrick has lived as a free woman in Washington state and she actually currently works at Western Washington University advising students.

It is speculated that this release was a political favor that Malaysia gave to Indonesia’s President Joko Widodo who goes up for re-election next month:

 An Indonesian woman held for two years on suspicion of killing North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s half brother was freed from custody Monday after Malaysian prosecutors unexpectedly dropped the murder charge against her.
Siti Aisyah cried and hugged her Vietnamese co-defendant, Doan Thi Huong, before leaving the courtroom and being ushered away in an embassy car. She told reporters that she had only learned Monday morning that she would be freed.

“I feel very happy,” she said later at a news conference at the Indonesian Embassy. “I didn’t expect that today will be my freedom day.”
The two young women were accused of smearing VX nerve agent on Kim Jong Nam’s face in an airport terminal in Kuala Lumpur on Feb. 13, 2017. They have said they thought they were taking part in a prank for a TV show. They had been the only suspects in custody after four North Korean suspects fled the country the same morning Kim was killed.
The High Court judge discharged Aisyah without an acquittal after prosecutors applied to drop the murder charge against her. They did not give any reason.

The trial will resume Thursday, with prosecutors expected to reply to a request by Huong’s lawyers asking the government to similarly withdraw the charges against her.
Indonesia’s government said its continual high-level lobbying resulted in Aisyah’s release. The foreign ministry said in a statement that she was “deceived and did not realize at all that she was being manipulated by North Korean intelligence.”
It said Aisyah, a migrant worker, believed that she was part of a reality TV show and never had any intention of killing Kim.

MSN via a reader tip

You can read much more at the link, but I like how they call Aisyah a migrant worker when she was a prostitute in Malaysia and that is how the North Korean agent recruited her.

Anyway her co-defendant Doan Thi Huong from Vietnam I suspect will get released as well since Aisyah was let go. The four North Korean agents that organized the murder all fled back to North Korea which means likely no one will be held responsible for murdering someone with a dangerous nerve agent in the middle of a busy international airport.

An Air Force lieutenant got in struggle for “strangling” a Korean taxi driver:

A U.S. Air Force 1st lieutenant assigned to the 51st Fighter Wing at Osan Air Base was reprimanded in February for strangling a Korean national after a night of drinking, according to a recent discipline update.

The lieutenant “grabbed a Korean National taxi driver’s neck while riding in the taxi after 1 a.m., the curfew time for U.S. forces in Korea,” Capt. Rachel Salpietra, a 51FW spokeswoman, told Task & Purpose.
The driver declined to press criminal or civil charges and accepted a voluntary settlement from the service member, Salpietra said, adding that alcohol “appears to have been involved” in the incident.

Task and Purpose via a reader tip

The article was headlined that he strangled the taxi driver, but grabbing his neck with no charges filed is quite different. Nevertheless the lieutenant was given an Article 15 and the punishment shared in an email that was headlined as “strangling” a taxi driver.

This caused people on the popular Air Force amn/nco/snco Facebook page to complain:

A senior airman found guilty of larceny for stealing a blanket was reduced in rank to an E-3 and forced to forfeit $1,116 in pay a month for two months.

Another senior airman found guilty of stealing a blanket and jacket was reduced in rank to an E-3 and slapped with 45 days restriction. (….)

“What I’m going to take from this is if you get cold, strangle a Korean national,” wrote one Air Force amn/nco/snco reader, “but whatever you do, DON’T STEAL A EFFING BLANKET.”

The difference is that the two airman robbed a Korean store for those items. So what is worse grabbing a taxi driver by the neck while drunk past curfew or willfully robbing a store?

The other thing to remember is that the airman can likely recover career wise from their discipline, the lieutenant on the other hand has his career ended since any promotion board will see the Article 15 and reprimand.

Via a reader tip comes this news of two former USFK soldiers charged in a murder plot in Michigan:

A woman and her boyfriend were deployed with the U.S. Army in South Korea when they conspired via Snapchat to kill her husband so she could claim the life insurance money, police in Michigan said.

Berrian County Judge Sterling Schrock ruled Wednesday in a preliminary hearing that the murder trial of Kemia Hassel, 22, and Jeremy Cuellar, 24, will begin April 30.
Both have pleaded not guilty in the Dec. 31 killing of U.S. Army Sgt. Tyrone Hassel III. Cuellar was also charged with a felony firearms count.
Authorities say the 23-year-old Hassel was ambushed while visiting his family in St. Joseph Township. He died of multiple gunshot wounds, including one to the head, according to the autopsy report.
All three were soldiers stationed at Fort Stewart in Georgia.
Kemia Hassel told police in a signed statement that she spent months planning how to kill her husband so she could continue her romantic relationship with Cuellar, Township Police Officer Mike Lanier testified Wednesday.
Kemia and Tyrone Hassel married in 2016 and had a 1-year-old son. She told police she was unhappy with her marriage, but didn’t want to go through a divorce because she then wouldn’t be able to receive any life insurance money, Lanier said.
Hassel and Cuellar began plotting while they were deployed in South Korea last year, Lanier said. The pair communicated through Snapchat because they believed the social media app’s temporary messages would make it difficult for police to trace, he said.

Associated Press

You can read more at the link.

Conservative journalists were thrown in jail for libel even though they reported true information, and a presidential aide is convicted of corruption and is sentenced to jail, and yet is able to walk around a free man:

A court on Thursday handed down a six-year prison term to a former senior secretary to President Moon Jae-in over a corruption case related to a gaming industry body, and one year in jail, suspended for two years, for abuse of power.
Jun Byung-hun, an ex-presidential aide for political affairs and a former lawmaker, has been suspected of forcing two home shopping channels — Lotte Home Shopping and GS Home Shopping — and telecom company KT to donate 550 million won (US$514,260) between 2014 and 2017 to the Korea e-Sports Association, over which he practically held control. But he was not taken into custody after the ruling. 
The Seoul Central Court also slapped him with a fine of 350 million won and an overdraft fee of 25 million won.
The court did not issue a warrant to arrest him as it judged that “it is appropriate for him to appeal to a higher court and solve the dispute (with the prosecution) without detention.”
“His criminal responsibility is grave,” the court said in its verdict, adding that Jun damaged the fairness and integrity of parliament by accepting bribes from companies related to his parliamentary activities.

Yonhap News

You can read more at the link.

USFK should expect that every incident involving US soldiers that the Korean media becomes aware of will be publicized:

Two female U.S. army soldiers have been questioned for allegedly assaulting a Korean man and a police officer in Dongducheon, police said Monday.

According to Gyeonggi Bukbu Provincial Police Agency, a private, 20, from the U.S. Eighth Army and a private first class, 19, from the U.S. 2nd Infantry Division were questioned in the early hours of the day after allegedly kicking and punching a man, 58, and a police officer.

This came after an altercation between the soldiers and the man at around midnight. How the trouble started is still unclear.

Police said the soldiers refused to say anything and returned to their units later.

Police plan to summon them again for questioning after checking surveillance cameras in the area.

We are not at the point that the Korean media will sensationalize these incidents yet. They will just matter of factly report every little incident to keep the GI crime narrative simmering with the public.

I suspect that after a peace treaty is signed and the Korean left mobilizes surrogates to push for US troop withdrawals that is when they will sensationalize every little incident that happens like they did in the late 90’s to early 2000’s timeframe.

Every Korean leftist’s favorite news presenter, Sohn Suk-hee is in trouble:

 Sohn Suk-hee, the chief and well-known news presenter of the cable channel JTBC, faced police questioning Saturday over an allegation that he used violence against a freelance journalist.
Sohn was accused of punching the journalist in the face several times during a dinner meeting in Seoul in January.
The journalist, identified only by his surname, Kim, insisted that Sohn offered him a job at JTBC, then assaulted him after he rejected the offer. Kim said he was reporting on a car accident in which Sohn was involved a few years ago.
To undergo the police questioning, Sohn arrived at a police station in western Seoul at 7:40 a.m. for his first police questioning since the scandal arose in early January.
The JTBC chief has denied the allegation against him. He has filed a charge accusing Kim of extortion.

Yonhap

ROK Heads may remember that Sohn is in charge of JTBC which was the news station that aired the report about the tablet PC that led to the impeachment of former President Park Geun-hye. However, since Park’s impeachment conservative journalists have proven that JTBC aired fake news to help bring her down.

Sohn Suk-hee then sued these journalists for libel that challenged JTBC’s reporting even though the reports were based on facts. The journalists were then sent to jail. It will be interesting to see if Sohn who committed a real crime, if the report of the assault is true, is sent to jail. If so he should be put in a cell right next to the journalists he had jailed.

Another Park Geun-hye era official is about to be indicted:

Prosecutors are expected to indict former Supreme Court Chief Justice Yang Sung-tae later this week on charges that he abused his power to influence high-profile trials as a political tool to lobby the previous government. 
Yang, 71, is under pre-indictment detention upon a court approval of his arrest warrant on Jan. 24. He’s the first former chief of South Korea’s top court to have been arrested as a suspect and now to face a criminal trial.
The retired veteran justice with a law career over 40 years is accused of using or seeking to use trials as leverage to lobby the office of then President Park Geun-hye to get her approval for the establishment of a separate court of appeals, his pet project. Yang headed the top court from 2011-2017. 
The Seoul Central District Court ruled that his charges were proven and that he posed a risk of destroying evidence. 
Prosecutors are widely expected to formally indict Yang later this week, right after the Lunar New Year holiday, which ends Wednesday.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link, but if Yang is such a risk to destroy evidence that he needs to be jailed why did they not jail him before the Lunar New Year?

Another rival of current ROK President Moon Jae-in is heading to jail:

Former South Chungcheong governor and one-time presidential contender An Hee-jung was placed under immediate detention on Friday after a Seoul court sentenced him to three and half years in prison on charges of rape and sexual assault. 

The verdict overturned that of a lower court and was the latest twist in a roller-coaster scandal that ensnared the highest-profile figure in Korea’s Me Too movement. 

The Seoul High Court Friday afternoon ruled that An used his authority to force his former secretary, Kim Ji-eun, into an adulterous sexual relationship against her will from July 2017 to February last year. 

Nine of the 10 incidents of sexual assault claimed by Kim were accepted by the court, which acknowledged that her disclosures in the case were “natural” and that she had no reason to falsely accuse An and would not benefit from his downfall. 

Joong Ang Ilbo

You can read more at the link.

This verdict is pretty surprising to me because so much was done to help cover Kim Kyoung-soo’s tracks during the special counsel investigation:

South Gyeongsang Gov. Kim Kyoung-soo was placed under immediate detention on Wednesday after a Seoul court sentenced him to two years and 10 months in prison for his role in a major online opinion-rigging scandal in collusion with a political blogger during the 2017 presidential election. 

The Seoul Central District Court ruled that Kim Kyoung-soo was a joint principal offender in the crime along with blogger Kim Dong-won, better known by his internet alias Druking, who was given a three and a half year prison sentence by the same court hours earlier.

The two were found guilty of jointly orchestrating a massive opinion-rigging campaign using a computer program to post and “like” thousands of comments on social media that supported Moon Jae-in’s election bid. 

“This crime severely debilitated the healthy formation of public opinion through exchange and debate in an online space,” said Seong Chang-ho, the judge presiding over the case at Kim Kyoung-soo’s sentencing Wednesday afternoon. “The criminality of this case is especially severe since public opinion was mechanically distorted away from the will of the electorate.”

Kim Kyoung-soo’s conviction and jailing marks a mighty fall from grace for a close ally of the administration and a presidential hopeful for the ruling Democratic Party (DP). 

He will retain his position as governor of South Gyeongsang for now, even in detention, but will be removed from office if his case goes to the Supreme Court and he loses. Election laws dictate that any elected official who receives a prison sentence or any fine above 1 million won ($895) are removed from their posts.

Joong Ang Ilbo

You can read more at the link, but this verdict can still be overturned on appeal by the ROK Supreme Court. Remember that the Moon administration just arrested the last ROK Supreme Court Chief Justice. Maybe they are sending a subtle message to the ROK Supreme Court to not cross the Moon administration. I guess we will see what happens.