By Lee Kyung-min
The prosecution was still waiting Thursday for a response from the Office of Court Administration (OCA) under the Supreme Court, after demanding it hand over computer hard drives that allegedly contain “heavily implicating material” stored in pass-code locked files. This follows rejections of earlier requests for the drives, and is considered the groundwork prior to a forcible search and seizure of relevant materials as allowed by law.
Seoul Central District Prosecutors' Office said it submitted a “letter of request” to the OCA to hand over eight computer hard drives used by former and current key officials. They include former chief justice Yang sung-tae, then-second-in-command Lim Chong-heon and his immediate superior Park Byoung-dae, the former OCA head who doubled as a top court justice.
The Supreme Court rejected an earlier request saying the data on the computers used by Yang and Park were irretrievably destroyed through degaussing, a guaranteed form of hard drive erasure. It said Tuesday that the standard method of data destruction was implemented last year as part of a protocol governing electronic devices use within the judiciary and not because of any then-growing speculation that it had sought to suppress critical voices within the judiciary by creating and managing a blacklist of judges, which was stored on the drives.
The high-profile scandal also involves an allegation that the top court under Yang delivered “friendly verdicts” on politically sensitive trials to the previous Park Geun-hye administration, in exchange for the establishment of what would have been a de facto “Second Supreme Court.” Evidence of this is also suspected to have been stored in documents on the same devices.
Prosecutors also asked for documents detailing the questioning of OCA officials about their suspected involvement in drafting and executing Yang's plan. These contain statements from 49 court officials including Lim, Park, former top court justices and non-ranking members who came up with specific ways to advance the establishment of the new court.
Seizing such documents, prosecutors believe, will largely uncover the command hierarchy, thereby enabling effective accountability for the figures involved, including Yang. This reflects concerns that many judges upon questioning are highly unlikely to make statements contradicting their superiors, a common “practice” within the mostly conservative organization. A review of the computers in question is deemed necessary, as three earlier in-house investigations came up with “absurd” conclusions without reviewing the data on the computers. The previous probes concluded there was no blacklist of judges, adding the OCA had not “punished” those deemed “anti-conformist, liberal” voices.
The Lawyers for a Democratic Society, a group of liberal lawyers, criticized chief justice Kim Myeong-su, Yang's successor, for reneging on his earlier promise to “cooperate with the prosecution” in resolving the matter. “We express deep regret over the top court's lukewarm stance in cooperating with the ongoing prosecution investigation,” the group said in a statement. “The truth of the allegations should be clearly uncovered through forcible means if necessary, including and not limited to search and seizure. if the court's repeated obstruction continues.”