The second trial of a professor who mobilized his students to ghostwrite the thesis suspended prison sentence.

A former law school professor accused of ghostwriting the papers of an incumbent prosecutor and another university professor to his students has been commuted in the second trial.

The Seoul Central District Court sentenced Roh, a former law school professor at Sungkyunkwan University who was put on trial for obstruction of business, to one and a half years in prison and two years of probation and ordered 120 hours of community service.

The court found Roh guilty of some of the charges as in the first trial, but judged that the sentence of the first trial was too high considering the circumstances in which he was disciplined at the university and imprisoned for eight months so far.

Former professor Roh, a former prosecutor, was put on trial in 2016-2018 on charges of mobilizing his graduate student assistants and instructors to write a thesis by prosecutor Jeong and four papers by his sister.

Former professor Roh was known to have been close to the father of the siblings.

The first trial sentenced former professor Roh to one and a half years in prison, saying he was guilty of ghostwriting prosecutor Jeong's younger brother's thesis, but that his involvement in the ghostwriting of prosecutor Jeong's thesis was not sufficiently proven.

Prosecutor Jeong's brother and sister were separately indicted on charges of preliminary examination for a doctoral degree or publishing it in academic journals, while prosecutor Jeong was acquitted and his brother was sentenced to probation of imprisonment, respectively.