Death Penalty News

SEOUL, June 5 (Yonhap) -- The government will push to scrap the period of extinctive prescription for the death penalty, currently set at 30 years, through legal revision, the Ministry of Justice said Monday. An amendment to the Criminal Act passed the Cabinet meeting on the day to eliminate clauses that exempt death-row convicts from the execution of the death sentence after 30 years, the ministry said. Articles 77 and 78 of the current Criminal Act stipulate that the period of prescription is completed if the death penalty has not been executed for 30 years.  If the amendment passes the National Assembly, the relevant provisions will disappear from the Criminal Act, the ministry said. The provisions were virtually dead letters in the past when the death sentence was executed soon after being finalized. But they have become a matter of concern, as the nation has not carried out any executions since December 1997.

The House of Representatives justice committee has batted for the measure overhauling the country's 85-year old Revised Penal Code, renaming penalties, adjusting fines, requiring joint civil and criminal proceedings, introducing community service, and lowering the minimum age of criminal liability to 12 years. In a statement, committee chair Rep. Reynaldo Umali sought the speedy passage of House Bill No. 6204, which seeks to replace Book 1, or the first 113 articles of the 367-article RPC. Book 1 was trimmed to just 78 articles. Umali was quoted in the statement as saying that legal complications and difficulty have arisen from the passage of special penal laws in the past eight decades. "Now we can hardly keep track of the exact number of penal laws that we have and there is difficulty in determining which law or laws are to be used to prosecute a particular criminal conduct," Umali added. Book 1 covers the "general principles on the application o...