On the morning of February 18, 2003, Kim Dae-han, a 56-year-old man from Daegu who had been out of work since a stroke two years earlier, caused the deaths of 192 people on the city's subway. More than 140 others were hurt. It remains the deadliest single crime in the history of South Korea. Daegu police held him within about two hours, and six months later the Daegu District Court sentenced him to life imprisonment. Prosecutors had asked for his death. The court refused, holding that his mental state could not be regarded as normal, that he was remorseful, and that most of the dying had followed from the failures of the people responsible for the system rather than from his own act.
That last finding gave the case its second half. Eight employees of the city's subway corporation stood trial beside him for professional negligence resulting in death and injury, and all but three went to prison. The corporation's president was tried separately for destroying evidence, and a third line of inquiry, into an altered record of what the corporation's staff had said to one another that morning, ran through the first weeks of the investigation. Kim himself never left custody. His life sentence became final in January 2004, and he died on August 30 of that year in Jinju.
Kim lived in the Seo-gu district of Daegu. For six years before his illness he earned his living behind the wheel, first of a private cargo truck and then of a taxi. In April 2001 he suffered a stroke. It left him partly disabled. He did not return to work.
He carried his illness as a grievance. He believed that the doctors who had treated him had failed him, and that his condition had not improved because they had not taken proper care of him. In August 2002 he received psychiatric treatment for depression. The bitterness spread outward. He came to blame society for what had happened to him, and by the time of the crime he had already been in trouble with the law; he had two earlier convictions, one of them for causing injury. He had been violent toward staff at the hospital where he was treated, and on two occasions he had caused public disturbances over threats to end his own life and been taken to a local police box.
In the weeks before February 18 he spoke openly about doing harm. He threatened the hospital, and he said he would kill a doctor he held responsible for his condition. The hospital made no formal report and sought no commitment, and none of it led to charges. He had no grievance against the subway, its staff or anyone who rode it.
On Tuesday morning, February 18, 2003, Kim boarded a train on Daegu's Line 1. Later that morning, in the center of Daegu, he committed the act for which he was later convicted. He told the court months afterward that he had meant to kill himself and had wanted to do it in a public place.
He survived and left with the crowd. Passengers who had seen him identified him, and police detained him in Daegu roughly two hours after the event. When detectives first questioned him he said he could not talk about what had happened, and then said nothing at all. Asked whether he had done it because he wanted to die, he nodded and gave no other answer.
The full count of the dead took time. The first figure given, 130, proved far too low; the estimate moved for weeks. The final toll was 192 people, with 151 injured; the trial court described the harm as more than 330 people killed or hurt.
The case was investigated by the Daegu Metropolitan Police Agency, and it moved quickly beyond Kim. Within days the inquiry had turned to how the subway corporation's own staff had responded in the minutes after the first alarm: the two train drivers on the line that morning, the controllers in the corporation's central control room, and a station attendant.
On the night of February 23 police took seven of those employees into emergency custody, including the driver of the second train. On February 24 the police agency applied for arrest warrants for ten people. For Kim the warrant cited death and injury resulting from an offense against an occupied structure under Article 164 of the Criminal Act. For the nine employees it cited death and injury by gross professional negligence. Three of the ten, Kim among them, were still in the hospital and were named in pre-arrest warrants.
The police also said they were examining whether the corporation's president and officials of the Daegu city government had been negligent, and the inquiry widened to the company that built the trains, the people who had built and supervised the station, and those responsible for its electrical and safety systems. The driver of the second train was investigated for possible concealment of facts after the event.
A second dispute opened over the site itself. On the morning of February 19, the day after the crime, police allowed the subway corporation to begin work there and withdrew their guard, and the corporation began clearing it. Representatives of the victims' families objected that the work was destroying what investigators would need. On February 24 they went to court for an order to preserve the site and called for the city's mayor, who headed the disaster response headquarters, and the police commander to answer for what had happened to it. That complaint later became the basis of the evidence case against the corporation's president.
On February 23 police seized the original magnetic tape of the radio exchanges between the corporation's central control team and its drivers that morning. They compared it with the transcript the corporation had already handed over and found that the two did not match. On February 25 the police agency announced that the corporation's version left out three telephone calls between the driver of the second train and the control room. Two employees of the corporation's audit department, police said, had removed the passage from the copy given to investigators, treating it as a sensitive matter.
The inquiry climbed the corporation's ranks. On February 27 police said a manager at section-chief level had taken part in the deletion with the two audit staff, and that the two had admitted reporting it to him. On March 3 they said the head of the central control team had passed word down, through a controller, to remove anything that could become a problem when the transcript was prepared, and that at least six people, three from the control office and three from the audit department, had acted together to strip the calls out. Police said they would charge those involved with destroying evidence once each person's part was clear, and that they were examining whether the president and the head of the audit department had known of the deletion or ordered it.
On March 4 the police released their interim findings and described the disaster as man-made, the product of negligence, delay and complacency inside the corporation as well as of Kim's act. Eleven people were dealt with in the first round. The interim findings left open how far the cover-up reached. Two audit department employees were booked without detention, and seven other staff were cleared after a preliminary inquiry. Because investigators had not been able to prove that the magnetic tape itself had been forged or altered, the police at first judged that charges of destroying evidence or obstructing officials would be hard to sustain.
On March 17 the police investigation headquarters sent its remaining files to prosecutors and closed its own inquiry for the time being, saying it would reopen if prosecutors asked. It referred fourteen people: eight connected with the transcript, among them the corporation's former president and the head of its audit department; four staff of the corporation's power control room; the head of the central control team; and the station master.
The next day the Daegu District Prosecutors' Office announced that it would take the case further than the police had. The prosecutors set out four lines of inquiry: the damage to the site; the purchase of the trains and their fittings and the running of the corporation, including equipment bought in bulk from favored suppliers without competitive bidding; a fresh investigation of everyone involved in the transcript, including the seven staff the police had cleared; and the conduct of the staff of the power control room.
On the site, the prosecutors said everyone involved was under examination: the city, the corporation, the police, the National Forensic Service and their own office, whose prosecutors' supervision of the site would be checked from inside.
Kim's state of mind was assessed before trial. A psychiatric expert examined him and found him normal, and the evaluation found no grounds for the defenses of insanity or diminished capacity under Korean law. Under questioning he had rambled and given the impression of instability, but the experts did not accept that this reflected a disorder that reduced his responsibility.
Prosecutors indicted Kim in custody. Eight of the employees were also indicted in custody on charges of professional negligence resulting in death and injury, and two others were charged without detention.
Kim was tried in the Daegu District Court before its 11th Criminal Division, together with eight of the subway employees, nine defendants in all. The joint trial put the man who had set the events in motion beside the men accused of failing to protect the passengers once they had begun.
At the closing hearing on July 23, 2003, prosecutors asked for the death penalty for Kim. For each of the eight employees they asked for five years' imprisonment without labor, the heaviest term the negligence charge allowed.
On July 30 Kim gave his final statement to the court. It consisted of little more than a request, made again and again, that he be put to death. His defense counsel argued for his life, asking the court not to impose the death penalty.
The court delivered judgment on August 6, 2003. It convicted Kim of the offense under Article 164 of the Criminal Act resulting in death, together with the other charges, and sentenced him to life imprisonment.
The court did not minimize what he had done. It held that an act committed in order to die alongside random strangers, out of despair over one's own life, was the kind of crime that deserved the most severe penalty, and it called the casualties unprecedented. It then set out the reasons it would not impose death. His mental and psychological state, the court said, could not be considered normal, and it was hard to find that he had acted in a normal frame of mind. He had repeatedly told the court that he wanted to die, and he appeared to be remorseful. And most of the deaths had followed from the faulty response of the subway corporation rather than directly from his act. Taken together, the court concluded, the conditions for a sentence of death were not met.
The same judgment settled the cases of the eight employees, each convicted of professional negligence resulting in death and injury. The driver of the second train received five years' imprisonment without labor, the full term the prosecution had sought; the court found that he had left without properly seeing to the evacuation of his passengers. The driver of the first train and the general controller first told of the emergency each received four years, the court finding that they had not responded properly or carried out their duty to protect passengers. Two other general controllers each received three years. Two mechanical controllers received terms of eighteen months and two years, and the station attendant two years and six months; all three of those sentences were suspended for three years, and the three men were released.
Prosecutors said they would appeal.
Both sides appealed. Prosecutors argued that the sentences were too lenient. Kim and the employees argued that they were too harsh and that the trial court had erred on the facts.
On December 4, 2003, the First Criminal Division of the Daegu High Court dismissed every appeal and left the trial court's judgment in place. It found no merit in the prosecution's claim of leniency, in the defendants' claim of severity, or in the claims of factual error. The defendants' faults, the court said, had brought about a major disaster, and the sentences imposed at trial were appropriate given the suffering of the victims and their families and the shock to society. Nothing material in the charges or the evidence had changed since the first trial.
Kim took the case no further. In December 2003 he gave up his right to appeal to the Supreme Court, and his life sentence became final in January 2004.
The employees went on to the Supreme Court. On April 16, 2004, its First Division dismissed their appeals. That confirmed five years for the driver of the second train, four years each for the driver of the first train and the senior general controller, and three years each for the other two general controllers.
The man who ran the subway corporation faced a case of his own. Prosecutors charged the corporation's president, without detaining him, with destroying evidence and with a violation of the Industrial Safety and Health Act. The charge rested on the clearing work he had ordered at the site in the days after February 18, carried out through a facilities manager without consulting the police, and continued after a representative of the victims' families had objected that it would damage the site. The prosecution treated that work as the destruction of evidence in both the case against Kim and the case against the drivers and controllers.
On July 29, 2003, the 12th Criminal Division of the Daegu District Court sentenced him to three years' imprisonment and a fine of five million won and took him into custody in the courtroom. The court found no direct intent to destroy evidence but held that he had acted with conditional intent, because he had pressed on after being told plainly of the families' objection. It said he had lied about it even in court and had shown no remorse.
On December 18, 2003, the First Criminal Division of the Daegu High Court cut the sentence to eighteen months and a fine of three million won. It called his culpability serious and said his conduct had deepened the families' suffering, but it gave weight to his years of diligent public service and to the fact that he had acted with conditional rather than direct intent. A former head of the corporation's facilities department, charged with the same offense, had been acquitted at trial, and the High Court rejected the prosecution's appeal against that acquittal.
On May 14, 2004, the Supreme Court's Second Criminal Division set aside the conviction for destroying evidence and sent that part of the case back to the Daegu High Court. The families had objected while the clearing was under way, but the court held that his failure to stop the work at once, or to consult investigators, did not prove that he had accepted the possibility that evidence would be destroyed; it was difficult, the court said, to conclude that he had the inner intention to tolerate that result.
After his sentence became final, Kim was moved on March 8, 2004, to a correctional facility in Jinju, where he was held under the care of its medical office. He died in Jinju on August 30, 2004, a year and a half after the crime. He was 56.
The question of Kim's mind runs through the case. The pretrial psychiatric evaluation found him normal and gave no grounds for a finding of insanity or diminished capacity. The trial court, without making a formal finding of either, held that his mental and psychological state could not be regarded as normal and counted that against the death penalty. Both conclusions stood, and the High Court did not disturb the sentence built on the second.
The court's finding that most of the deaths followed from the corporation's response, rather than directly from Kim's act, was one of the reasons he was spared. It was also the basis on which the employees were convicted, and the appeal courts upheld both judgments.
The deletion of the telephone calls from the corporation's transcript was established by the police, but the reach of the cover-up was never fixed. The police said they could not prove the tape itself had been altered. The president's evidence conviction was set aside by the Supreme Court in May 2004 and returned to the Daegu High Court.
April 2001: Kim suffers a stroke and is later registered with a Grade 2 physical disability.
August 2002: He receives psychiatric treatment for depression.
February 18, 2003: 192 people die and 151 are injured in Daegu; police detain Kim about two hours later.
February 19, 2003: Police allow the subway corporation to begin work at the site.
February 23, 2003: Police take seven subway corporation employees into emergency custody and seize the original radio tape.
February 24, 2003: The Daegu Metropolitan Police Agency seeks arrest warrants for Kim and nine employees; families' representatives apply for a court order to preserve the site.
February 25, 2003: Police announce that the corporation's transcript omitted three telephone calls.
March 3, 2003: Police say at least six employees acted together to remove the calls.
March 4, 2003: Police release interim findings describing the disaster as man-made.
March 17, 2003: Police refer fourteen people to prosecutors and close their inquiry for the time being.
March 18, 2003: The Daegu District Prosecutors' Office expands its investigation headquarters.
July 23, 2003: At the closing hearing, prosecutors seek the death penalty for Kim and five years for each of eight employees.
July 29, 2003: The Daegu District Court sentences the corporation's president to three years for destroying evidence.
July 30, 2003: Kim gives his final statement to the court.
August 6, 2003: The Daegu District Court sentences Kim to life imprisonment and the employees to terms of up to five years.
December 4, 2003: The Daegu High Court dismisses all appeals.
December 2003: Kim gives up his right to appeal to the Supreme Court.
December 18, 2003: The Daegu High Court reduces the president's sentence to eighteen months.
January 2004: Kim's life sentence becomes final.
March 8, 2004: Kim is moved to Jinju.
April 16, 2004: The Supreme Court dismisses the employees' appeals.
May 14, 2004: The Supreme Court sets aside the president's evidence conviction and returns it to the Daegu High Court.
August 30, 2004: Kim dies in custody in Jinju.