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進入《TAIPEI TIMES》 Father thankful for jail term for daughter’s killer
Tseng Kin-fui, the father of Taiwanese student Elaine Tseng who was killed by a drunk driver in Seoul in 2020, left, thanks a South Korean court for upholding an eight-year jail term for the driver in an undated screengrab. Photo courtesy of Tseng Kin-fui via CNA
EIGHT-YEAR SENTENCE: The family of the student, killed by a drunk driver in South Korea, feared that a retrial of the case might lead to a more lenient term
/ Staff writer, with CNA
The father of a Taiwanese woman who was killed by a drunk driver in Seoul in 2020 thanked a South Korean court for adhering to justice after the court on Tuesday upheld an eight-year prison sentence handed down to the driver, a man surnamed Kim.
The father, Tseng Kin-fui （曾慶暉）, said in a pre-recorded video that although he was dissatisfied with the ruling, the driver’s eight-year prison term is the longest sentence so far for drunk driving- caused deaths in South Korea.
The parents of the victim choked back tears when talking about their daughter’s death.
The father said that losing his daughter means a lifetime of pain.
“The drunk driver not only destroyed my daughter’s life, but also ruined a happy family,” he said.
Tseng said he wanted to thank a lot of people, many of whom he does not know, and the media for their assistance, particularly his daughter’s friends who repeatedly wrote letters to judges working on the case.
Tseng said his daughter’s death should not be in vain, adding that he hoped this would remind people in Taiwan not to drink and drive, to cherish life and protect others.
The level of drunk driving fatalities in Taiwan is too high, he said.
The South Korean Supreme Court in December last year demanded a re-examination of Kim’s eight-year prison sentence.
Tseng’s daughter — Elaine Tseng （曾以琳）, at the time a doctoral student at Torch Trinity Graduate University in Seoul — was hit and killed when Kim on Nov. 6, 2020, ran a red light as she was walking home from a professor’s residence.
The Supreme Court remanded the case back to the Seoul Central District Court on grounds that the sentence might have been too harsh and breached the South Korean constitution.
The district court on Tuesday upheld the eight-year prison sentence for the 53-year-old drunk driver.
The ruling is final.
The court maintained the sentence by applying aggravated penalties for special crimes — dangerous driving causing death in this case — and road traffic law contraventions.
The district court said drunk driving poses a considerable threat not only to the driver, but also to the life and property of others.
Therefore, the district court exercised its judicial discretion to give priority to societal consensus on the need for heavy punishments for such behavior, it said.
In the first trial in April last year, Kim was sentenced to eight years in prison, after taking into consideration that he was fined for drunk driving in 2012 and 2017, even though prosecutors only sought a six-year jail term.
An appellate court then upheld the conviction and sentence in August last year based on the 2018 revisions of South Korea’s Road Traffic Act — called the Yoon Chang-ho act, named after a drunk driving victim — which called for aggravated punishments for repeat drunk driving offenders.
However, the South Korean Constitutional Court in November last year struck down the revisions as unconstitutional, saying that the vague definition of “repeat offenses” did not take into account the time between them.
That led to the Supreme Court decision on Dec. 30 last year to send the case back to the appellate division of the Seoul Central District Court for a retrial.
Tseng’s family had feared that a lighter penalty could be handed down as a result, the family’s lawyer said.
However, they are happy that justice prevailed in the final verdict, the lawyer said.
新聞來源：TAIPEI TIMES
