Prosecutors in Seoul asked for the death penalty on Tuesday in the trial of Kim So-young, 20, who is accused of handing men drinks containing benzodiazepines at a motel in the Gangbuk district of the city. Two men died. Four more were injured. One was left unconscious.
The request came at the closing hearing before the fourteenth criminal division of the Seoul Northern District Court, presided over by judge Oh Byung-hee. Prosecutors also asked for thirty years of electronic monitoring and the forfeiture of seized items. Their stated grounds were the gravity of the outcome, that she went on to the killings while already under investigation for an earlier assault charge, that the men had shown her goodwill and were defenceless, and that she had been consistently untruthful from the investigation through to the courtroom without showing remorse. The verdict is set for 27 August.
What the prosecution put in front of the court to establish premeditation was a forensic extract from her phone: a record of questions put to a generative AI chatbot. According to both papers we read, the questions covered overdosing on sleeping pills, the risk of death from taking sleeping pills together with alcohol, and the sentencing range for abandonment resulting in death. One concerned the legal liability for leaving a collapsed person without help. Her answer in court was that she first saw the records during the investigation and does not remember what she asked.
Her case is that there was no intent to kill. Through her lawyer she accepted handing drugged drinks to some of the men but said she did not know the compound or a lethal dose, and that she acted to stop unwanted sexual advances because of earlier trauma. She denied the additional injury charges outright and asked for the monitoring order to be refused. Reading a written statement in tears, she said she had never intended or planned to kill anyone.
One procedural note from the day. Her lawyers asked for the questioning and the final statement to be closed to the public, citing the stigma of coverage. The court refused, saying that trials are open as a matter of principle and that no special ground for closing them had been shown.
Why it is on the board
Three separate items about this hearing were on our Korean lenses when we collected: a video running at 9,040 views an hour, and two entries on the reading list — one at 7th and one at 27th.
The two list entries are not carrying the same thing. The lower one, at 27th, is the sentence the prosecution asked for. The one at 7th is her account of the men who died and were injured. On our list, the framing that ranked higher was hers.
확인: 세계일보 · 파이낸셜뉴스