A lawyer for an election commission official who died after being questioned by a special counsel team has alleged that the questioning was coercive. The lawyer said investigators had settled on a version of events in advance and pushed for statements to match it, with the prosecutor shouting when the desired answers did not come.
Park Hyun-jung, an attorney at the law firm Dodam who represented the man, a National Election Commission employee in his 40s identified only as A, issued a statement on the 22nd. "I believe setting out clearly what happened that day is a matter of respect for the deceased," Park said. Park attended A's questioning as a suspect on Oct. 20 in person.
According to Park, when A answered that he was not sure, the prosecutor in charge rose from the seat and shouted, "I'm asking you about something general, and you say you don't know?" When Park objected that "shouting and applying pressure because you are not getting the answer you want is coercion," the prosecutor replied, "That is because you are not telling the truth," she said. Park criticized the session as an attempt to fit statements to a predetermined conclusion, saying, "The prosecutor treated their own judgment as established fact and demanded answers that matched it."
Park also raised questions about when the session ended. She said she had asked investigators to wrap up at around 6:30 p.m. because A was struggling with the length of the questioning, but the team responded that "we need consent for anything after 9 p.m., but we can question him until then." Park said the team "used rules meant to protect suspects as leverage to apply pressure instead."
She also took issue with how the questioning was conducted. Park said an investigator holding the junior rank of assistant inspector (경장), a judicial police assistant serving in a supporting role, led the questioning throughout the day, while the prosecutor asked questions from the side and a special investigator from behind. She also said "a considerable share of the questioning had a questionable connection to the special counsel's stated purpose of determining the facts behind the ballot shortage in the 9th local elections," calling it a fishing expedition.
A was questioned by the special counsel on Oct. 20 as a suspect in a case involving bid rigging and breach of trust, and was found dead the following day, Oct. 21, in a flowerbed at an apartment complex in Bongdam-eup, Hwaseong, Gyeonggi Province. The special counsel team has expanded its investigation into alleged bid-rigging to cover service contracts for election supplies more broadly.
The special counsel team denied the allegations of coercive questioning. It had earlier said that "the lawyer was present from the start of the questioning until he went home, and because he did not want a nighttime session, we ended the questioning at around 8:55 p.m." It added that "there was no coercive atmosphere at all, and no objections were raised about the method of questioning or the contents of the record."