A federal judge on Monday ordered North Korea to pay more than $500 million in damages to the family of college student Otto Warmbier, whose death prompted a lawsuit.
“North Korea is liable for the torture, hostage taking, and extrajudicial killing of Otto Warmbier, and the injuries to his mother and father, Fred and Cindy Warmbier,” Chief Judge Beryl Howell of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia wrote in a strongly worded opinion.
Otto Warmbier, 22, was a college student who was arrested in North Korea in January 2016 for attempted theft. He allegedly attempted to steal a propaganda poster during a guided tour, and was sentenced to 15 years’ imprisonment with hard labor.
North Korea claimed he had suffered a severe neurological injury from an unknown cause in June 2017, and was freed that same month. He never regained consciousness after returning to the U.S., and he died on June 19, 2017.
A coroner’s report was unable to able identify the cause of the injury that ultimately lead to his death.
Fred and Cindy Warmbier and the estate of their son had sought more than $1 billion in damages from the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, holding the country liable for Otto’s death.
“Before Otto traveled with a tour group on a five-day trip to North Korea, he was a healthy, athletic student of economics and business in his junior year at the University of Virginia, with ‘big dreams’ and both the smarts and people skills to make him his high school class salutatorian, homecoming king, and prom king,” Howell wrote. “… He was blind, deaf, and brain dead when North Korea turned him over to U.S. government officials for his final trip home.”
Howell said North Korea is liable for more than $21 million compensatory damages and $150 million in punitive damages.
The Trump administration placed North Korea on the list of state sponsors of terrorism in November 2017, making the lawsuit by the Warmbier family possible under the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act.
“I’m going to stand up to evil when I see it. There’s nothing more evil than North Korea,” Cindy Warmbier said at hearing on the lawsuit last week. The wrongful death lawsuit was filed in April.
North Korea has repeatedly denied that Warmbier was ever tortured while in custody.
