Today, 443 days after declaring martial law on December 3, 2024, former President Yoon Suk Yeol was sentenced to life in prison for leading an insurrection. The court found that his martial law decree, the deployment of troops to blockade the National Assembly, and the attempt to detain political figures constituted an act of insurrection against the constitutional order.
Many Koreans had hoped for the death penalty—the prosecution had asked for it, and the charge of leading an insurrection only allows three possible sentences: death, life with labor, or life without labor. The court chose life.
I have complicated feelings about this. As someone who believes the death penalty should be abolished, I shouldn't want it imposed on anyone, and in principle I don't—not even on Yoon. But there's a practical dilemma that's hard to ignore. South Korea has a precedent here: Chun Doo-hwan, who led the 1980 military coup and the Gwangju massacre, was sentenced to death at his first trial, reduced to life on appeal, and then pardoned by President Kim Young-sam. He walked free. If the starting point is already life in prison rather than death, it's even easier for an appeals court to reduce the sentence further, and for some future president to pardon him down the road.
So the discomfort isn't really about wanting Yoon to die. It's about the gap between what the sentence says and what actually happens in practice. And that points to a deeper problem: the presidential pardon power. As long as a sitting president can unilaterally pardon anyone—including someone convicted of trying to overthrow the very constitutional order the presidency is supposed to protect—no sentence feels truly final. I'd rather see the death penalty abolished and the pardon power curtailed, so that life in prison actually means life in prison.
