Ousted President Yoon appeals life sentence for martial law
South Korea’s jailed former president, Yoon Suk Yeol, has appealed his life sentence for rebellion over his brief imposition of martial law in December 2024, his lawyers said on Tuesday. The conservative leader, who faces multiple trials over his power grab, expressed defiance following his conviction at the Seoul Central District Court last week. He called the decision illogical, said his actions were “solely for the sake of the nation and our people,” and accused the judge of being biased against him.
In a text message, Yoon’s lawyers said they aimed to address the supposed “errors in fact-finding and misinterpretations of the law” contained in last Thursday’s ruling. The case will now be sent to a specialized panel at a Seoul High Court established under a law passed in December to handle cases involving rebellion, treason and foreign subversion. “We will never be silent about what we view as an excessive indictment by a special prosecutor, the contradictory judgment rendered by the lower court based on that premise, and its political circumstances,” Yoon’s legal team said.
Yoon’s martial law decree, announced late at night on Dec. 3, 2024, lasted about six hours until a quorum of lawmakers broke through a blockade of heavily armed soldiers and police at the National Assembly. They then voted to overturn it, forcing his Cabinet to lift the measure.
Yoon was suspended from office on Dec. 14, 2024, after being impeached by the liberal-led legislature and was formally removed by the Constitutional Court in April 2025. He was re-arrested in July and now faces eight criminal trials over the martial law debacle and other allegations, with the rebellion charge carrying the heaviest punishment. Though brief, Yoon’s martial law decree triggered the country’s most severe political crisis in decades, paralyzing politics and high-level diplomacy and rattling financial markets. The turmoil eased only after his liberal rival Lee Jae Myung won an early presidential election last June.
Yoon has claimed that his martial law decree was a legal and necessary act of governance against liberals controlling the legislature, portraying them as “anti-state” forces paralyzing state affairs by impeaching high-level officials, cutting his budgets and obstructing his agenda. But the Seoul Central District Court said Yoon’s actions amounted to orchestrating a rebellion, ruling that he mobilized troops and police in an unlawful bid to seize the legislature, arrest political opponents and establish unchecked rule for a “considerable time.”
A special prosecutor who investigated Yoon’s rebellion charges had sought the death penalty, saying he deserved the harshest punishment under the law given the threat his actions posed to the country’s democracy. Following last week’s ruling, Jang Woo-sung, a member of the special prosecutor’s investigation team, hinted that they intended to appeal, saying they had unspecified “reservations” about some of the court’s factual findings and the severity of the sentence.
South Korea has not executed a death-row inmate since 1997, in what is widely seen as a de facto moratorium on capital punishment and popular calls for its abolition. Yoon is the first former South Korean president to receive a life sentence since late military dictator Chun Doo-hwan, who was sentenced to death in 1996 for his 1979 coup, a bloody 1980 crackdown on pro-democracy protesters in Gwangju that left more than 200 people dead or missing, and corruption. The Supreme Court later reduced Chun’s sentence to life imprisonment, and he was released in late 1997 under a special presidential pardon.
