After a man in his 50s wearing an electronic ankle monitor went on a knife rampage at a large commercial complex in Incheon's Guwol-dong, more than 70% of requests for ankle monitor orders in recent violent crime trials were found to have been rejected. Courts denied the orders even in cases where defendants were assessed as having a high risk of reoffending, prompting criticism that judicial standards are unclear.
An analysis by The Seoul Economic Daily of first-trial rulings in violent crime cases from January of this year through the present, published on the judiciary's information disclosure portal, found that 17 of 24 requests for electronic ankle monitor orders, or 70.8%, were rejected, the paper reported on the 16th. In 11 of those cases, the defendant had been classified as "high" risk of reoffending under assessments such as the Korean Offender Risk Assessment System-General (KORAS-G). Of the 17 defendants whose orders were denied, 11 had prior convictions.
In seven cases, courts rejected attachment orders for defendants who scored 15 points or higher on the risk assessment — above the 14 points recorded by the 59-year-old Incheon suspect. No attachment order was issued even in an attempted murder case in which a defendant with 13 prior punishments for violent crime struck a neighbor with a steel hammer. The court cited reasons including that probation alone would be sufficient to prevent reoffending.
Kim Sang-kyun, a professor in the police science department at Baekseok University, said the standards need to be clarified by combining objective indicators such as risk assessments with qualitative evaluation. "When an attachment order is rejected, probation itself needs to be upgraded through methods such as profiling so that monitoring can be carried out properly," he said.