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| Bereaved family members of the victims of the ferry Sewol say the Supreme Court's guilty verdict on Lee Joon-seok, the captain of the ferry, has relieved their grief a little, during a press conference in front of the court in southern Seoul, Thursday. The court sentenced him to life imprisonment, upholding his negligent homicide conviction. / Yonhap |
Top court confirms life sentence
By Chung Ah-young
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| Sewol ferry captain Lee Joon-seok |
This is the first top court ruling to recognize negligent homicide in a large-scale human disaster.
The court handed down the unanimous ruling which found him responsible for abandoning hundreds of passengers, mostly students, without giving an evacuation order when the Sewol capsized and sank off the country's southwest coast in April last year.
The top court said that as the law requires the captain to take measures to rescue passengers, his actions were considered equivalent to "homicide by willful negligence."
"If he had ordered passengers to evacuate in a timely manner, the majority could have been rescued and would have survived," Chief Justice Yang Sung-tae said in the ruling. "But he instructed them to stay on board and left the ship with some of the crewmembers, using the rescue boats of the Coast Guard, which made it extremely difficult, and maybe even impossible, for the passengers to evacuate."
His behavior was seen as intentionally and completely giving up his duty as captain of the ship, it said.
The top court stated that neglecting his duty was the same as homicide.
Previously, a district court found him not guilty of murder but convicted him of gross negligence, sentencing him to 36 years in prison in November last year.
However, the Gwangju High Court sentenced Lee to life in prison on charges of negligent homicide, overturning the lower court's ruling.
The district court recognized Lee's claims that he ordered the crew to evacuate the passengers. But the high court said evidence did not support this because an announcement was made to order passengers to stay on board and not try to evacuate even after Lee left the ship.
Prosecutors sought the death penalty for him as his actions lead to the deaths of more than 300 passengers.
The top court also upheld the high court's ruling that sentenced 14 crew members to between 18 months and seven years in prison for negligence, noting that they were under Lee's command.
Last month, the Supreme Court upheld a lower court's ruling that sentenced Kim Han-sik, president of Chonghaejin Marine, the ferry operator, to seven years in prison on manslaughter charges. The court found Kim guilty for failing to prevent the overloading of cargo on the ship that caused it to tilt and sink.
The Sewol sank in April 2014, killing 304 people. Most of the victims were teenagers who were on the way to Jeju Island on a school trip.
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