Sreya Kanugula
The Supreme Court of South Korea upheld the 20-year prison term sentence given to ex-President Park Geun-Hye for the crimes of bribery and several others.
This brought the end of a corruption case so historic for the country that it marked Park’s fall from grace acutely due to her being the first female leader of South Korea.
The ruling conveys that the 68-year-old conservative icon who was previously ousted from her office as well as arrested in the year 2017, could potentially serve an added sentence of 22 years behind prison bars.
This is following a conviction made separately on her after she was caught with illegal meddling in the candidate nominations of her party, right before the 2016’s parliamentary elections.
But her prison term being finalized also grants her eligibility for a possible presidential pardon made specially by the current president, owing to their upcoming presidential election in March 2022 being in the hands of a widely-split electorate.
The current president Moon Jae-in, a political liberal who took office after Park was removed, hasn’t made any references to granting a pardon to his predecessor.
However, there has been mention of the idea among the Democratic Party members Moon belongs to, one of them being Lee Nak-yon the chairman.
He mentioned a national unification gesture would be granting pardon to Park as well as Lee Myung-bak, another previous president serving time on his corruption charges for a term of 17 years.
Park described herself to be a victim of a vendetta of political revenge. She had refused to previously attend her trials in October 2017, and she didn’t make an appearance at the recent ruling either.
Moon’s office, which has seen the tanking of the rating of public approval in his favor to new lows on the recent rising economic, political, and health problems, made no immediate response to Park’s ruling.
Park’s conviction was made on evidence found on collusion with Choi Soon-Sil, her old-time confidante on taking bribes in several million dollars as well as extorting several major South Korean business groups (Samsung included) while in office from around 2013 to 2016.
Charges were indicted on her upon the illegal acceptance of funds sent monthly by her spy chiefs, the same funds diverted right out of their agency’s budget.
After long weeks of protests made by millions, her impeachment happened in the month of December in 2016 by legislators. Her official removal from office happened after the Constitutional Court held up the decision taken in March of 2017.
She was originally facing a prison sentence higher than 30 years before the Supreme Court sent some of her cases back for re-evaluation to a lower level court in the year 2019.
In 2018, the High Court of Seoul sentenced Park to a prison term of 25 years after careful review of the charges of power abuse, extortion, and bribery as well as other charges put together against her.
But in the month of October of 2019, the High Court was ordered by the Supreme Court to deal with Park’s charges of bribery separately from the other criminal charges, based on one of the laws requiring any involvement of officials elected or a President in such cases. This is applicable even if the crimes that are alleged have been committed together.
In July 2019, the Seoul High Court gave Park a 5-year sentence on the charges on the spy funding. But an order of retrial was given on the same case by the Supreme Court in November.
Advocates appealed on Park’s behalf after the 20-year sentence was given to her by the High Court in July 2020.