Top court finalizes 5-year prison sentence for driver in deadly City Hall crash
Published: 04 Dec. 2025, 13:07
Updated: 04 Dec. 2025, 18:51
![The driver behind the deadly wrong-way crash near City Hall Station, surnamed Cha, appears at the Seoul Central District Court in Seocho District, southern Seoul, for a pretrial detention hearing on July 30, 2024. [NEWS1]](https://koreaseafood.online/data/photo/2025/12/04/9812727c-e608-4ccc-9703-b5496d61af5a.jpg)
The driver behind the deadly wrong-way crash near City Hall Station, surnamed Cha, appears at the Seoul Central District Court in Seocho District, southern Seoul, for a pretrial detention hearing on July 30, 2024. [NEWS1]
The Supreme Court on Thursday finalized a five-year prison sentence for a man who killed nine people and injured five after driving the wrong way near City Hall in central Seoul last year.
The court upheld the lower court’s ruling convicting the driver, surnamed Cha, of negligent homicide under the Act on Special Cases Concerning the Settlement of Traffic Accidents. Cha was sentenced to five years in prison without labor.
Cha was initially sentenced to seven years and six months in prison in the first trial, but an appellate court in August reduced the term to five years. Prosecutors appealed the decision, but the Supreme Court sided with the appellate ruling.
The key legal debate in the case centered on whether Cha’s actions constituted real concurrence, meaning multiple, distinct criminal acts resulting in multiple offenses, or imaginary concurrence, meaning a single act resulting in multiple offenses.
The lower court had treated each fatality and injury as a separate act, sentencing Cha to the maximum of seven years and six months — based on the most severe charge, with an additional half added under Korea’s real concurrence rule.
However, the appeals court found that Cha’s action — mistaking the accelerator for the brake — was a single act that resulted in multiple harms, making it an imaginary concurrence case. Under this interpretation, only the sentence for the most severe charge applies, with no additional time added, making five years the maximum.
“The accident was caused primarily by the defendant mistakenly pressing the accelerator instead of the brake, constituting a single act, with the resulting harm simply being different outcomes of that one action. Therefore, the offenses fall under imaginary concurrence,” the appellate court ruled.
The Supreme Court agreed with that reasoning and finalized the sentence.
The deadly incident occurred around 9:26 p.m. on July 1, 2024, when Cha exited the underground parking lot of the Westin Josun Hotel near City Hall Station in Jung District, central Seoul. He drove in reverse against traffic, mounted the sidewalk and struck pedestrians and two vehicles.
A total of nine people were killed and five others were injured.
Cha claimed unintended acceleration during the investigation, but prosecutors found no evidence of vehicle defects and concluded that the crash was caused by driver error — specifically, stepping on the gas pedal instead of the brake. He was indicted and detained in August last year.
This article was originally written in Korean and translated by a bilingual reporter with the help of generative AI tools. It was then edited by a native English-speaking editor. All AI-assisted translations are reviewed and refined by our newsroom.
BY CHO MUN-GYU [[email protected]]
with the Korea JoongAng Daily
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