Seung Jae-hyun
The author is a senior research fellow at the Korean Institute of Criminology and Justice.
The death penalty is the heaviest sentence in the Korean criminal justice system. Capital punishment can fall on a person who committed a grave murder. Currently, there are 59 on death roll for homicide. Under the Korean criminal law, capital punishment is executed upon the justice minister’s command.
But the order has not been made since 23 convicts were executed on Dec. 30, 1997. Amnesty International categorizes Korea as an abolitionist country in practice “in that they have not executed anyone during the last 10 years or more and are believed to have a policy or established practice of not carrying out executions.”
The Korean criminal law dictates a prescriptive period on execution. In the case of the death penalty, the execution is exempted when the 30-year time limit is spent. If an inmate spent 29 years and four months in prison as of May, the prescriptive period for execution would expire in November. The Justice Ministry recently abolished the prescriptive period after questions arose over it effectiveness. In short, Korea has a death penalty, but it has not carried out any executions for 26 years. A death sentence automatically changes to life imprisonment after the scrapping of the time limit on the execution of the death penalty.
A chain of random murders recently took place in Korea, causing alarm in response to the unfamiliar mass crime. People were killed on streets in broad daylight while waiting for a friend, in department stores where families shop, and in parks where people take a rest. The fear of terror that anyone could be killed unsettled people. The Justice Ministry announced it will enforce “life imprisonment without parole” to stop serious crimes.
Its plan has raised a debate. To find an answer, we must accurately examine Korea’s circumstance. We must first study if death is sentenced on the very crime punishable for death. If convicts of serious felony are sentenced to death, life imprisonment without parole could be unnecessary. But if a death sentences is not given for heinous crimes, life without the possibility of parole (LWOP) instead can be an option to consider. But you have to weigh if the LWOP is really an appropriate sentence. A legal revision could be necessary if the LWOP sentence is found too light an option for brutal crimes.
In Korea, no death sentence had been upheld by the Supreme Court, regardless of the graveness of the crimes. Lee Young-hak was sentenced to death for raping and killing a friend of his daughter in September 2017; Kwon Jae-chan was sentenced to life in December 2021 for killing an acquaintance and his accomplice to the crime; and the life sentence of a convict was elevated to the death penalty after killing an inmate in the same month of the year. But the top court lowered the death sentence to a life sentence or returned the case to the lower court.
Koh Yoo-jung who brutally murdered her ex-husband in May 2019; Jang Dae-ho who killed a motel guest and damaged his body in August 2019; Choi Shin-jong who murdered two women and abandoning their bodies in April 2020; Kim Tae-hyun who killed the family of the woman he had stalked and killed in March 2021; and Jeon Joo-hwan who killed the woman he had stalked in Sindang Station in September last year were all sentenced to life.
The same life sentence was delivered to the crimes regardless of the number of people they had murdered, the brutality of the rape-killing of a minor, or damages to the bodies. Korean courts opt to sentence life over death on serious criminal cases.
But the current law puts the convicts on life sentence as subjects for parole after 20 years in prison. In the case of a convict in a 40-year imprisonment, parole can be granted after serving 30 years, because the period of parole cannot exceed 10 years. Under the current system, parole can come faster for those on life sentence than those with a time-fixed sentence. LWOP is necessary to fix the injustice.
LWOP is gaining ground, as the court increasingly pointed to the need for punishment in the trials of the horrendous cases of Choi Shin-jong, Jang Dae-ho, and Kim Tae-hyun.
The death sentence falls on the court and the responsibility of its execution on the Justice Ministry. A debate without taking into account the reality is meaningless. We need a reasonable option when death is neither sentenced nor carried out. The issue of adopting LWOP poses a serious challenge to the Constitutional Court deliberating the constitutional validity of the death penalty.
Translation by the Korea JoongAng Daily staff.
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