SEOUL, South Korea (AP) – South Korea’s Supreme Court held on Thursday a 20-year prison sentence for former President Park Geun-hye for bribery and other crimes, in closing a case of historic corruption which marked a marked fall from grace for the country’s first female leader and conservative icon.
The ruling means that Park, who was removed from office and arrested in 2017, can serve a combined sentence of 22 years behind bars after a separate conviction for illegal meddling in his party’s nominations before the 2016 parliamentary elections.
But ending her prison sentence also makes her eligible for a special presidential pardon, an imminent possibility as the deeply divided electorate approaches the next presidential election in March 2022.
President Moon Jae-in, a liberal who won the presidential election after Park’s removal, has not yet directly addressed the possibility of freeing his predecessor. Moon recently saw his approval rating drop to new casualties over economic problems, political scandals and growing coronavirus infections.
Many conservative politicians have asked Moon to release Park and another convicted former president, Lee Myung-bak, who is serving a 17-year term on his own corruption charges. At least one prominent member of Moon’s Democratic Party, Lee Nak-yon, endorsed the idea of forgiving former presidents as a gesture of “national unity”.
Park, 68, describes himself as a victim of political revenge. She has refused to appear at the trials since October 2017 and did not attend Thursday’s decision. His lawyer did not return calls for comment.
The fall of Park and Lee Myung-bak extended the series of decades of South Korean presidencies that ended badly, fueling criticism that the country puts too much power that is easily abused and often passes unchecked in the hands of elected leaders.
Almost all former presidents, or their families and advisers, were involved in scandals near the end of their terms or after leaving office.
A president, Park’s dictator father, Park Chung-hee, was murdered by his spy chief in 1979. Another former president, Roh Moo-hyun, Moon’s longtime friend and political mentor, died in 2009 amid allegations that his family members took bribes from a businessman during his presidency.
Kang Min-seok, Moon’s spokesman, said Park Geun-hye’s decision marked the “maturation and growth” of South Korea’s democracy, but added that the arrest of a former president for crimes is a story. “unhappy” that should not be repeated. Presidential officials avoided specific responses when asked whether Moon might forgive Park and Lee.
Shin Young-dae, a Democratic Party spokeswoman, demanded that Park issue an apology for the “unbearable shame” she left for the country’s history.
Park was convicted of conspiring with her longtime confidant, Choi Soon-sil, to receive millions of dollars in bribes and extortion from some of the country’s largest business groups, including Samsung, while she was in office from 2013 to 2016.
She was also indicted for illegally accepting monthly funds from her spy chiefs, who were diverted from the agency’s budget.
After protests by millions of people that lasted weeks, Park was impeached by lawmakers in December 2016 and officially removed from office in March 2017, after the Constitutional Court upheld the impeachment.
It was not immediately clear how Thursday’s decision would affect the legal saga of Samsung’s descendant billionaire, Lee Jae-yong. The vice president of Samsung Electronics, 52, faces a decision in the Seoul Supreme Court next week in a retrial on charges that he bribed Park and Choi to get government support for a 2015 merger between two affiliates that helped strengthen their control over the country’s largest business group.
Prosecutors are seeking a nine-year prison term for Lee, who was indicted separately on charges of manipulating stock prices, breaches of trust and audit violations in connection with the merger. Lee’s lawyers portrayed him as a victim of abuse of presidential power and described the 2015 deal as part of “normal business activity”.
Choi is serving an 18-year prison sentence.
Park initially faced a prison sentence of more than 30 years before the Supreme Court sent his cases back to a lower court in 2019.
The Seoul High Court in 2018 sentenced her to 25 years in prison after reviewing her for bribery, extortion, abuse of power and other convictions together.
But the Supreme Court in October 2019 ordered the Seoul Supreme Court to handle Park’s bribery charge separately from other charges, based on a law that requires it for cases involving a president or other elected officials, even when the alleged crimes are committed together.
The High Court had given Park a five-year term on the espionage fund charges in July 2019, but the Supreme Court also ordered a retrial on the case in November, instructing the lower court to apply the charge of cause losses in state funds.
Prosecutors appealed after the Seoul Supreme Court gave Park a 20-year term in July last year, after the merger of the two cases.
If Park serves his sentence in full, she will be released in 2039, at the age of 87.