Gyeonggi Province Governor Choo Mi-ae. [Yonhap]
Gyeonggi Province Governor Choo Mi-ae. [Yonhap]

Gyeonggi Province Governor Choo Mi-ae said Saturday that the controversy surrounding the Jang Yun-gi case must not shake efforts to push through prosecution reform.

"Even if there is distrust and anxiety about handing investigative authority exclusively to police, that cannot be used as an excuse to delay reform of a prosecution that has usurped democratic constitutional order," Choo said in a social media post Saturday.

Choo cited the recently controversial case of Jang Yun-gi, convicted of murdering a high school girl in Gwangju, to criticize arguments for preserving prosecutors' supplementary investigative powers. She said prosecutors' supplementary investigations are equivalent to direct prosecutorial investigations, and allowing them would not constitute a genuine separation of investigative and indictment powers.

On allegations that Jang's father, an active-duty senior police officer, was involved in destroying evidence related to the case, Choo said the issue was "a failure to avoid conflicts of interest, not a problem with the separation of investigative and prosecutorial powers."

"This is a matter that should be handled by having the Corruption Investigation Office for High-ranking Officials investigate abuses of investigative authority and crimes of legal distortion," she added.

Choo said the separation of investigative and prosecutorial powers "is not a question of which side — prosecutors or police — is more capable or trustworthy, but an attempt to restore criminal justice for the people, grounded in popular sovereignty."

Meanwhile, a special investigation team under the Korean National Police Agency's National Investigation Headquarters, which is probing allegations of investigative misconduct in the Jang Yun-gi case, expanded its probe to the investigation command Saturday, conducting a search and seizure of the Gwangju Metropolitan Police Agency chief's office and other locations.


yeonjoo7@heraldcorp.com