High court overturns acquittal of ex-PSS chief over phone data deletion

An appellate court on Wednesday overturned the acquittal of Park Jong-joon, former chief of the Presidential Security Service (PSS), who was indicted for deleting secure phone data involving former President Yoon Suk Yeol and others following Yoon's martial law declaration in 2024.

The Seoul High Court sentenced Park to one year in prison for destroying evidence by deleting data from secure phones, reversing a lower court's ruling that found him not guilty of the charges.

Park was indicted in December last year on charges of arbitrarily deleting data from secure phones used by Yoon, former National Intelligence Service official Hong Jang-won and former Seoul Metropolitan Police Agency chief Kim Bong-sik through a remote logout function following the December 2024 martial law declaration.

Special counsel Cho Eun-suk's team had demanded a three-year prison term for Park.

The appellate court said it could not rule out Park's intent to destroy evidence when he deleted secure phone data belonging to Yoon, Hong and Kim.

Park has been held in detention in a separate case after being sentenced to four years in prison on charges of obstructing investigators' execution of a warrant to detain Yoon in January 2025. An appellate court ruling in that case is scheduled for Oct. 28.

Yonhap