DUI offenders get off scot-free as police sit on investigation requests
Published: 06 Apr. 2026, 18:20
![Police conduct drunk driving tests outside Yanggang Elementary School in Yangcheon District, western Seoul, on March 4. [YONHAP]](https://koreaseafood.online/data/photo/2026/04/06/ed02212d-a6e6-4940-a7fb-5562a4525718.jpg)
Police conduct drunk driving tests outside Yanggang Elementary School in Yangcheon District, western Seoul, on March 4. [YONHAP]
South Chungcheong police sat idle on cases that needed supplementary investigation for prosecutors, thereby allowing two driving under the influence (DUI) offenders to go without charges because the statute of limitations had expired.
The Seosan Branch Office of the Daejeon District Prosecutors’ Office recently received records for four cases that police in Seosan, South Chungcheong, had closed without sending them to prosecutors.
The prosecutors' office asked police to carry out supplementary investigations in 2021 for two DUI cases and two fraud cases.
The cases were left unattended for five years after the supplementary investigation requests, causing the statutes of limitation on the two DUI cases to lapse.
DUI cases timed out
The Seosan prosecutor's office received the records between January and March for two Road Traffic Act violations involving drunk driving and two fraud cases that police had decided not to send to prosecutors, legal sources said Sunday.
The files arrived more than five years after the prosecutors requested supplementary investigations into the cases in 2021. Both DUI cases had expired as the statute of limitations for simple drink driving is capped at five years.
For one of the cases, police had taken five years just to verify the dashcam footage after the driver was allegedly caught driving under the influence.
The driver was caught driving with a blood alcohol concentration of 0.13 percent, high enough to trigger a license revocation, in October 2020.
The Seosan branch office asked police in January 2021 to clarify the discrepancy between the timestamp on the dashcam footage attached to the case file and the actual time the driver was caught for driving drunk.
In the other drunk driving case, the Seosan branch office asked police in February 2021 to conduct a supplementary investigation, requesting that a witness be questioned again. That case also passed its statute of limitations.
Data retrieved five years later
While the statute of limitations has not expired on the two fraud cases, the investigators are expected to have difficulty identifying the suspects because of the amount of time that has passed since the alleged crimes.
The two cases had victims who filed complaints saying they lost 720,000 won ($477) and 400,000 won, respectively. One case involved the suspect failing to pay the promised amount after purchasing an online game account, while the other involved not sending a mobile phone after receiving payment.
For both cases, police decided not to send the cases to prosecutors, citing difficulty identifying suspects and confirming criminal intent.
“It happened because our computerized system was not fully in place in 2021,” said a police official. “The records were kept in a shared filing cabinet, but the person in charge failed to enter them into the system and left them out.”
“We found the omitted cases while clearing out the filing cabinet and reported them and decided not to send them to prosecutors,” the official said. “We later found a total of four missing cases through a full review.”
![Daejeon Metropolitan Police Agency in Daejeon [SHIN JIN-HO]](https://koreaseafood.online/data/photo/2026/04/06/3542c1c7-525f-4ada-a7b3-fd909ca5ce28.jpg)
Daejeon Metropolitan Police Agency in Daejeon [SHIN JIN-HO]
No way to enforce
Investigation rules governing cooperation between prosecutors and police require police to act on a prosecutor’s request for supplementary investigation within three months of receiving it.
The rule is meant to prevent delays, but there is no penalty or enforcement mechanism when police miss the three-month window.
“In practice, there are many cases that run past the three-month mark,” said a prosecutor in the Seoul metropolitan area.
“Because a request for supplementary investigation is not enforceable, there is no way to do anything even if it is not carried out properly or is delayed.”
Prosecutors made 52,083 supplementary investigation requests to police in the first half of last year, according to the Supreme Prosecutors' Office.
A total of 12,256 cases, or 23.5 percent of the total cases, had their period exceed the three-month time frame.
Cases that took three to six months for police to either send the case back to prosecutors or close it with a decision not to send it to prosecutors accounted for 16.2 percent, or 8,429 cases, and cases that took more than six months or were not acted on accounted for 7.3 percent, or 3,827 cases.
![Daejeon Prosecutor's Office [SHIN JIN-HO]](https://koreaseafood.online/data/photo/2026/04/06/f825c70b-3c0d-4dc4-8c87-67ed1a4ef527.jpg)
Daejeon Prosecutor's Office [SHIN JIN-HO]
Untraceable by prosecutors
When prosecutors ask police to conduct a supplementary investigation, the case drops out of the prosecution’s case-number system.
Cases returned to police for supplementary investigation or closed by police with the decision to not be sent to prosecutors are not recorded as prosecution cases, potentially allowing the cases to go untracked after the request is made.
“The need for effective supplementary investigations will only grow as prosecutors lose their investigative powers in the name of prosecution reform,” said Cha Jin-a, a professor at Korea University School of Law. “If even supplementary investigations are curtailed, there will be no way left to control the primary investigative agency.”
The prosecution reform suggested by the government, which passed the National Assembly on March 21, effectively dissolves the prosecution service. It will also be establishing a serious crimes investigation agency and an indictment agency to split the roles of the prosecution service.
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 JEONG JIN-HO [[email protected]]
with the Korea JoongAng Daily
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