If a cracker from the Hitler country was fucking around and not following the standards by which a guest in the country is expected to do then it's his fault. I get that to him from his perspective it would've seemed like such a nothingburger, and that we as members of the imperial core may sympathise with him at first, but he broke into a military section of the extravagant hotel he was staying at in order to steal this poster. It's sad that he passed during due to unrelated complications, but if he wanted to not be arrested he shouldn't have broken into the military wing of a country his homeland has been nothing but hitlerite towards.

And I mean unrelated, his medical complications were not due to his treatment (perhaps stress, to be fair) and the medical treatment I've read had been some of the best available to the DPRK despite embargo due to the ultimately political nature of his situation. Don't cry too hard though, US Congress has authorized that his parents are entitled to roughly 500 million dollars worth of the DPRK's economy if it ever "liberalizes".

A guy from a country that's bombed and killed 20% of their civilians, used biological weapons against them, and regularly sabotages them, stole something to bring it back to his fraternity. It's literally on video. I don't think he deserved 15 years of hard labour, but I don't blame the Koreans for suspecting that it wasn't yet another US military project. The US would happily turn the DPRK into Syria. As Stephen Gowans has said, the country is constantly on high alert from all the random bomber missions and aircraft fleets that Amerika threatens with the explicit intent of destabilising and draining the DPRK.

The reason was that he was acting like a suspicious cracker from a country that sends almost nothing but suspicious crackers there. 95% of Americans who go to the DPRK are either feds or fed associated journalists who want to smear the place. So this suspicious cracker breaks into a military section of a hotel, is told to go back to his room, does so but then sneaks back to the military wing to do something fucky with a poster.

They were really harsh on him, but acting like a spy while being the exact type of person who would be sent to the DPRK as a spy isn't nothing. The guy was an idiot.

You clearly haven't retained anything about the case. As you can even see from the picture, he was not beaten to a coma in his arrest, and later on even gave testimony (not that the testimony was particularly valuable) that was video recorded and broadcast on TV. He fell into a coma after that point. There is zero evidence that his comatose state was related to police brutality, with even his own parents, with full access to his medical records from his vegetative return on, had nothing to cite proving the coma was induced by torture except him having a scar on his foot that they didn't know about and some crooked teeth. No evidence of fractures, no bruising, no dislocations, no chipped teeth, no signs of concussion, nothing.

He most likely contracted botulism, which is more prevalent in the DPRK due to its poverty, or a similar disease while in custody. Because the DPRK had a limited ability to identify the disease and to treat it, it was not able to save him before he became vegetative.

Nowhere in this story is there room for "pigs did a guy to death". The DPRK handling of some jackass US dude flagrantly breaking their laws and trespassing in a military space was humane by all available evidence.