Taipei, Dec. 31 (CNA) The daddy of a Taiwanese lady who was killed by a drunk driver in Seoul in 2020 was dissatisfied by the South Korea Supreme Court docket’s latest rejection of the driving force’s eight-year jail sentence, a choice that might end in a extra lenient penalty.
The daddy, Tseng Kin-fui (曾慶暉), advised CNA on Friday that he was “extraordinarily dissatisfied by South Korea’s authorized system” and mentioned he and his spouse have been each heartbroken and exhausted after studying the information.
His late daughter, Elaine Tseng (曾以琳), was a Ph.D scholar at Torch Trinity Graduate College in Seoul. On Nov. 6, 2020, she was hit and killed on the age of 28 by a drunk driver, surnamed Kim, who ran a crimson gentle as she was strolling house from a professor’s residence.
In an interview Friday, her father, an anesthesiologist on the publicly-run Chiayi Hospital, expressed confusion over the Supreme Court docket’s order for a retrial after it decided the harder punishment for a repeat drunk driver offender like Kim was unconstitutional.
Whereas nations like Taiwan are stiffening DUI legal guidelines, South Korea goes backwards, he argued.
Within the first trial of the case earlier this yr, Kim was sentenced to eight years in jail although prosecutors solely sought a six-year jail time period.
An appellate courtroom then upheld the conviction and sentence in August primarily based on 2018 revisions of a site visitors act that grew to become referred to as the Yoon Chang-ho Act.
Yoon was killed by a repeat drunk driver offender, which led to a public outcry for heavier punishments for such criminals, and the revisions named after him mandated harsher penalties for repeat DUI offenders.
In November, nonetheless, South Korea’s Constitutional Court docket struck down the revisions as unconstitutional, arguing that the definition of a “repeat” offender was too obscure, in response to South Korean media.
That led the Supreme Court docket’s determination on Dec. 30 to ship the case again to the appellate courtroom, asking it to use a drunk driving legislation that doesn’t stipulate harder penalties for repeat offenders, South Korean media mentioned.
Utilizing one other legislation will probably cut back the driving force’s sentence, a scenario that left the sufferer’s dad and mom disillusioned.
Tseng Kin-fui mentioned he’ll proceed to enchantment the Supreme Court docket’s ruling and perform public campaigns that have been launched after his daughter’s demise to lift anti-DUI consciousness in South Korea.
The campaigns embody a petition initiated by Tseng Kin-fui, his spouse and a South Korean pal of their daughter that has been posted on the presidential workplace web site Cheong Wa Dae.
The petition requires the utmost sentence for vehicular murder to be raised, to make sure that the punishment shall be extreme sufficient to forestall comparable tragedies from occurring sooner or later.
