Incident with People`s Revolutionary Party Will Be Tried Over Again?

Ten Months after a retrial was demanded over the incident with the People`s Revolutionary Party in 1974, the court is to make a decision on whether to hear the case again.

According to the Seoul District Court`s plan, it will discuss the deliberation schedule with the lawyer for the case early next week and they will have deliberations three or four times per month starting October and decide on whether to retry the case around the end of this year.

The court decided to call in officials of the Committee for Fact-finding on Unidentified Deaths as references during deliberations, which is unprecedented.

When there is a request for retrial of a criminal case, the chief justice usually makes a decision on whether to hear again, only based on documents presented, including new evidence. The court has already finished review of 30,000-page documents that were handed over by the Ministry of Defense in July.

The request of a retrial was made by bereaved families who say they lost their family members to the case fabricated by the then government in December last year, when the Committee for Fact-finding on Unidentified Deaths announced the results of its investigations in September, 2002 that suspects` interrogatories and statements as well as the case itself were fabricated by the Korean Central Intelligence Agency (now the National Intelligence Service).

Therefore, an important issue during the deliberations is whether the conclusion made by the government committee can be a cause for a retrial.

The existing law allows request for retrial only when different situations take place, compared with the time when the final judgment was made or new material evidence comes up.

If the court accepts the request, then it is tantamount to its acknowledgment of misjudgment. In this context, many people, including those in the legal profession, are showing much interest in the court`s decision. Against this backdrop, some civic groups contend that a thorough fact-finding investigation should be made through the enactment of a special law on the case.

In the incident with the People`s Revolutionary Party, suspects were indicted on charges that they orchestrated an attempt to overthrow the then government by a national federation of youths and students for democracy in 1974. Then the court sentenced eight out of 23 people that were indicted to death and the executions were carried out 20 hours later.

Soo-Kyung Kim skkim@donga.com