Life Term for Captain in South Korea Ferry Disaster
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Version 0 of 1. SEOUL, South Korea — The captain of the South Korean ferry that capsized a year ago, killing more than 300 people, most of them teenagers, was sentenced on Tuesday to life in prison in an appeals court ruling that convicted him of murder. The conviction of the captain, Lee Jun-seok, on murder charges was a victory for prosecutors and victims’ families, who protested a lower-court ruling last November that acquitted him of murder, citing lack of evidence, and sentenced him to 36 years in prison on lesser criminal charges, like violations of ship safety laws. On Tuesday, the high court in Gwangju, a city in the southwest of the country, reversed the lower-court verdict, accepting prosecutors’ arguments that Mr. Lee, 70, committed “murder through willful negligence” when he and his crew abandoned his ship and passengers without taking required steps to help them. The 6,825-ton ferry Sewol was making a turn in treacherous waters off the southwestern tip of South Korea on April 16, 2014, when it suddenly tilted and sank. An inquiry showed that the ship had been carrying twice the legal limit of cargo and that to accommodate that excess cargo, the vessel had dumped much of the ballast water that was needed to keep its balance. “Because of Captain Lee’s irresponsible behavior, many young students died without their lives blossoming,” the presiding judge, Seo Kyong-hwan, said Tuesday in his verdict and sentencing of Mr. Lee and 14 other crew members from the ferry. “His conduct, which helped send the country’s national prestige crashing down, can never be forgiven.” The lower-ranking crew members received sentences of one and a half to 12 years in prison for shirking their duty to help passengers. In the lower-court ruling, Park Gi-ho, the ship’s chief engineer, was sentenced to 30 years in prison for murder through willful negligence for abandoning two injured cooks whom the court said he could have saved. On Tuesday, he was acquitted of that charge and received a sentence of 10 years on less serious charges. The defendants have a week to appeal their convictions to South Korea’s highest court, the Supreme Court. South Korea remained traumatized a year after the Sewol tragedy. Most of the 304 people who died were students from a single high school on a trip to a resort island. The crew repeatedly urged passengers to stay inside the vessel while all the ship’s 15 navigational and engineering crew members, including the captain and mates, fled on the first Coast Guard rescue boats that arrived at the scene. Historically, murder through willful negligence has been a difficult charge to prove in South Korea. Until this case, no crew member had ever been convicted of it in connection with a ship disaster. In charging Mr. Lee and other senior crew members with murder through willful negligence, prosecutors argued that they had failed to sound an evacuation alarm or take other steps that could have saved lives. During the lower-court trial, it was never clearly established whether Mr. Lee had given an order to evacuate, though that order, if given, never reached passengers in their cabins. During the trial, Mr. Lee and other crew members tearfully apologized for their poor seamanship but said that they had never meant to commit murder. Their lawyers argued that the crew members were more harshly punished than others responsible for the catastrophe. Investigators have also placed blame for the sinking on the ferry company, which had dismissed complaints about routine overloading of the ship; regulators who colluded with the company and failed to stop such problems; and the Coast Guard, which has been accused of bungling the early rescue effort. |