Why former President Yoon will not be executed

When prosecutors earlier this month demanded the death penalty for former President Yoon Suk Yeol for insurrection, the most important thing to understand was not what they were asking for, but what they were not going to get.

This may not be apparent to readers overseas, but Yoon will not be executed. He will not even come close. Everyone in Korea knows this, including the prosecutors who made the request, the politicians cheering them and the judges who will eventually rule on it.

That does not mean Yoon will escape punishment. He will not. He’s already faced some. He’s been impeached. His political career is over, his reputation is destroyed and he will almost certainly spend time behind bars. But death? No. Theater is too cynical a word, but capital punishment in this case is performative. It is a gesture.

The confidence with which Koreans greet such announcements often puzzles outside observers. In my office, it was not even a topic of conversation until the two foreign employees couldn’t take it any more and asked people what they thought.

Our justice system does not function quite the way textbooks suggest it should, and certainly not the way fans of Korea’s democracy overseas assume it does.

In other democracies, the law is supposed to speak last and loudest. In Korea, the law speaks, but politics listens, nods and then decides what actually happens.

There is no state religion in Korea, but there is something close to a state belief system — and it is the worship of power. Politics is king here, literally and metaphorically. This is not meant as clever wordplay. The centrality of power is bound up with status, hierarchy and recognition, desires that exist everywhere but which are particularly amplified in Korea, perhaps because of its Confucian inheritance.

Power was not incidental. It was the organizing principle of society, based on Confucian hierarchies. That ancient echo still reverberates today, giving politics in Korea an importance that exceeds mere administration.

The president, despite constitutional limits, is not treated as a glorified secretary-general. He or she is closer to a temporary monarch.

The real meaning of democracy, given this background, is that power now lies with the people. We are in charge. That has two consequences for the actual powerholders. First, the monarch only reigns for five years. Second, during that reign — and especially as it nears its end — the public is free to insult, denounce and ultimately prepare the moral and legal grounds for throwing the former ruler in jail.

We worship and despise our leaders at the same time. That tension fuels the cycle.

Seen through this lens, the Yoon case looks less puzzling. In high-profile political trials, the role of prosecutors is not simply to uncover the truth, nor is the role of courts merely to calibrate guilt and punishment. Their immediate function is to throw a bone to the people.

We, the snarling mob, want our fury acknowledged, fed and then managed.

This can happen without destroying the appearance of democracy because the judiciary, in practice, remains subordinate to political power. Not in the crude sense of judges receiving phone calls from politicians, but in the more subtle choreography of outrage and release. Courts may issue spectacularly harsh sentences to assuage public anger, and then political authority intervenes later — quietly, mercifully — once passions have cooled.

For this system to work, prosecutors must almost always win. In Korea, they do so roughly 97 percent of the time. There are many reasons for this. The point is not the methods but the function: Conviction reassures the public that justice has been done.

Sometimes, of course, the underlying wrongdoing is thin. An earlier president, Park Geun-hye, committed the crime of upsetting the people after a television program claimed she let her best friend have too much influence. She received a 30-year sentence, officially for — er, I forgot. Her punishment far exceeded the moral clarity of any actual crime.

Yoon’s case is different in one crucial respect. He did do something genuinely grave. Declaring martial law and deploying troops to prevent the National Assembly from voting against it was a direct assault on constitutional order. His impeachment was justified, and in a real sense, that was already his punishment.

But some people want more. They want blood. The system obliges by promising it, so prosecutors ask for death. The public vents. Everyone goes home satisfied.

We all know Yoon does not deserve execution. Even calls from ruling Democratic Party of Korea politicians to carry out the sentence appeared to be posturing.

Party chief Jung Chung-rae called the prosecutor’s demand “poetic justice" and said "history's judgment, as well as the court's verdict, will not forgive insurrection." Trust me, he was talking about his feelings, not the ghoulish fact of the long drop.

Yoon is unlikely to be executed. We might seem hysterical, but we’re not that nasty. My prediction is a death sentence at first instance, reduced on appeal to life imprisonment without labor, followed eventually by a presidential pardon, perhaps six or seven years from now — or if fate is unkind, ten.

Frankly, ten years would seem a little harsh.

Michael Breen (mike.breen@insightcomms.com) is the author of "The New Koreans.” The views expressed here are his own.