Recently, amid the so-called 'Jang Yun-gi case,' allegations have surfaced that a serving senior police officer was involved in destroying evidence, severely shaking confidence in front-line investigative agencies. Serious moral hazard and systemic loopholes have been laid bare within the national investigative apparatus, whose job is to uncover the substantive truth of crimes and protect victims.

From a common-sense perspective, when the police's internal control system has failed like this, the proper response is to tighten external oversight and checks even further. Yet the current debate on restructuring the criminal justice system is heading in exactly the opposite direction. It proposes the complete abolition of even the prosecution's 'supplementary investigation authority,' which is the bare minimum legal check on police investigations.

To understand why abolishing the prosecution's supplementary investigation authority is so dangerous, one must first face how dire the situation is at the front lines of investigation today, especially in the investigation of economic crimes such as fraud and embezzlement. From the standpoint of someone handling actual legal practice, the sense of crisis over the investigative vacuum has already passed the tipping point. In the past, when a victim suffered fraud and filed a complaint, investigative agencies followed the money through compulsory measures such as account tracing and put pressure on the perpetrator. But since the redistribution of investigative powers, things have completely changed. With a massive volume of cases pouring into the economic crime teams of local police stations, it has become practically impossible for investigators, plagued by chronic staff shortages and overwhelming workloads, to quickly dig into cases entangled with complex financial structures or civil law issues.

As a result, a farce is now playing out in legal circles: victims of crime, unable to simply wait and rely on a police investigation, first file a civil lawsuit together with their counsel, secure key evidence such as bank transaction records themselves through the court's fact-inquiry process, and only then file a criminal complaint. Individual victims are spending their own money to fill in a domain of public authority that the state ought to exercise. This is because lawyers and victims feel, to the bone, how woefully insufficient the investigative agencies' capacity is. In this desperate reality, cutting off even the prosecution's authority to take over an incomplete police investigation, fill the gaps in the evidence, and decide whether to indict amounts to giving fraudsters wings.

The core of the Criminal Procedure Act amendment currently being pushed is to abolish the prosecution's direct investigation authority and supplementary investigation authority, leaving only the 'right to request' supplementary investigation by the police. In practical terms, this heralds an enormous disaster. If prosecutors can no longer conduct supplementary investigations themselves, then even when an obvious gap is found in the case file or a key witness interview has been omitted, prosecutors will be unable to investigate it directly and will have to send the file back to the police. The police, buried under mountains of new complaints, will have to reexamine the returned case, and in the process the case falls into the so-called 'investigative ping-pong,' bouncing between the police and the prosecution for months, or in long cases, years.

Time is squarely on the perpetrator's side. In a fraud case, for example, the ultimate goal goes beyond punishing the perpetrator to the victim's 'recovery of losses.' During the one or two years that an investigation is delayed, fraudsters have already siphoned off the proceeds of their crimes into accounts held under other people's names or laundered and hidden them in virtual assets and the like. Even if an indictment eventually comes, victims are left to shed tears of blood, having lost the entire fortune of a lifetime, in front of a perpetrator who is already penniless. Abolishing supplementary investigation authority is not merely a matter of stripping the prosecution of its powers; it is an act that permanently deprives victims of their 'golden time' for recovering their losses.

Economic criminals and politicians with capital and information can hire lawyers and defend themselves one way or another. But ordinary citizens who have lived honestly all their lives, only to lose everything overnight to voice phishing, jeonse (rental deposit) fraud, or coin investment scams, have no choice but to depend on the state's investigative power.

The reality is that even with the prosecution and police mobilizing and coordinating all of their investigative capabilities, they are hard-pressed to keep up with increasingly sophisticated intelligent crimes. Countless citizens have been suffering for years from investigative delays and gaps, and yet, without offering a single effective measure to remedy this, the attempt to pull out the last remaining safety pin of the justice system, trapped in the political dogma of 'curbing prosecutorial power' at all costs, is utterly irresponsible.

Investigative authority is not the exclusive property of any particular agency; it is merely a tool entrusted to the state to protect the lives and property of the people. Any reorganization of the system must be carried out strictly from a practical, citizen-centered perspective: 'How can wronged victims be helped more quickly and accurately?'

If a problem of misconduct or corruption arises with particular police officers, the normal legislative direction is to strengthen recusal rules to prevent conflicts of interest and to upgrade a system of mutual checks in which higher-level and other agencies can immediately step in and investigate. Abolishing supplementary investigation authority, pushed through without any clear alternative or investment in investigative infrastructure, will ultimately go down in history as the most painful blunder: one that turned its back on the tears of innocent victims and handed criminals a free pass. (Shin Dong-woo, Managing Partner, DAEON Law Firm)

Source: Mediafine News (https://www.mediafine.co.kr)