The court sentenced a man in his 40s who committed only the third murder to life imprisonment.



The Chuncheon Court of the Seoul High Court sentenced 47-year-old Lee to life imprisonment for the murder of a woman he lived with.



Mr. Lee was charged with killing his partner, Mr. A, with her weapon between the night of May 5 last year and the dawn of the next day.



Mr. Lee met Mr. B by chance in mid-April of last year and started living together after drinking. About two weeks later, on the day of her crime, Mr. B suspected that he was meeting another man, and after an argument, he killed him with a weapon.



He had already been convicted of two murders.



In May 2001, eight days after serving her sentence for inhaling hallucinogenic substances, she visited her ex-wife, who refused to live with her, and took her life.



Lee was sentenced to 10 years in prison in the first trial and 8 years in prison in the second trial, and was released on parole in February 2009.



Then, even after remarrying a Vietnamese woman, she continued an affair with another Vietnamese woman. In 2012, when the woman's mother objected to her marriage, she committed a second crime by killing this mother in Vietnam.



Lee was sentenced to 14 years in prison by a Vietnamese court and was released from prison in August 2020 after serving about 8 years and 5 months locally and was deported to Korea.



In less than two years after that, he committed the third crime, and received 32 points out of 40 in the psychopath diagnostic evaluation received during the investigation.



In this evaluation, a score of 30 in the United States or 25 in Korea is classified as a high-risk group with high psychopathic tendencies.



Chuncheon District Court Gangneung Branch, who was in charge of the first trial of this case, said, "The defendant has little preventive effect due to punishment, and the risk of recidivism is high when he returns to society."



Mr. Lee objected to the verdict, saying, "I accidentally committed the crime while drunk," but the second trial dismissed the appeal, saying that the verdict of the lower court was reasonable.



Dissatisfied with the judgment of the appellate court, Lee appealed to the Supreme Court.



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