The Supreme Court in Seocho-gu, Seoul. [Yonhap]
The Supreme Court in Seocho-gu, Seoul. [Yonhap]

The Supreme Court has upheld a dismissal of charges against defendants in the so-called "elite university drug club case," confirming that prosecutors unlawfully initiated an investigation into the suspects. The court agreed with the appeals court's finding that prosecutors had no authority to independently open a new investigation based on leads uncovered while handling a separate drug case referred by police.

The Supreme Court's First Division, presided over by Justice Cheon Dae-yeop, on Thursday affirmed the appeals court ruling dismissing the indictments against defendants identified as A and B, who had been charged with violating the Narcotics Control Act for offenses involving methamphetamine and cannabis. A dismissal of charges terminates a case without a ruling on the merits. Under the Code of Criminal Procedure, courts must dismiss charges when the indictment procedure violates legal requirements and is therefore void, or when charges are filed again in a case that has already been prosecuted.

The court said the appeals court had committed no legal error in its interpretation of the scope of crimes for which prosecutors may initiate an investigation under the proviso of Article 4, Paragraph 1, Item 1 of the Prosecutors' Office Act.

Defendant A was a member of an inter-university club in the greater Seoul area and faced charges of purchasing, receiving and using narcotics — including methamphetamine, LSD, MDMA and cannabis — in 2023. Defendant B, a physician at a university hospital, was charged with purchasing and using MDMA together with A, possessing MDMA and smoking liquid cannabis.

The trial court sentenced A to two years and six months in prison, suspended for three years, and B to one year in prison, suspended for two years. The court said drug-related crimes are difficult to detect by nature and cause serious harm to individuals and society due to the addictive properties of narcotics, adding that the defendants' conduct was serious given the types of drugs involved and the circumstances under which they came to use them.

The appeals court reached an entirely different conclusion. It overturned the trial court's verdicts and dismissed the charges against both A and B, finding that prosecutors had no authority to directly initiate an investigation into the two defendants and that the subsequent indictments were therefore unlawful.

The appeals court took issue with how A and B came to fall under prosecutorial scrutiny. In December 2023, police had referred a case to prosecutors involving C, the club's president, on charges of selling and using LSD and possessing methamphetamine. While pursuing additional offenses in that referred case, prosecutors separately identified criminal conduct by A and B.

According to the court, in May 2024 a club member identified as D submitted a voluntary confession during the prosecution's investigation, which first brought A's alleged conduct to light. The confession stated that D had used what appeared to be methamphetamine and had taken LSD together with A. Prosecutors used this as a lead to open a direct investigation into A and, in the course of that investigation, also uncovered alleged offenses by B, expanding the probe.

The Prosecutors' Office Act allows prosecutors to initiate investigations into crimes "directly related to crimes they became aware of in connection with a case referred by a judicial police officer." The central question before the appeals court was therefore whether the offenses of A and B were directly related to the original case referred by police.

Prosecutors argued that the offenses of A and others had come to light in the course of investigating club president C's drug case, that some evidence overlapped, and that direct relatedness should be recognized because all the offenses were of the same type — drug crimes.

The appeals court rejected that argument, noting that the offenses of A and others had not been discovered directly in the course of investigating the police-referred case but had instead come to light through a separate investigative lead — the voluntary confession of another club member. The court also noted that neither A nor B was a co-offender in the police-referred case, and that B was not even a member of the club in question. "If the mere fact that offenses are of the same or similar type were sufficient to permit prosecutors to initiate an investigation, there is a risk that the scope of crimes prosecutors may investigate would expand excessively," the appeals court said.

A further procedural problem arose because the same prosecutor who opened the investigation also personally filed the indictments against A and B. Article 4, Paragraph 2 of the Prosecutors' Office Act prohibits prosecutors from directly indicting defendants in cases they themselves initiated.


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