Same crime.
Different sentence.

3.6 million × ratio in monetary harm — but the bus driver lost his job permanently while the Samsung heir continues to lead one of the world's largest conglomerates.

The Sentencing Commission's guidelines explicitly contemplate 'economic contribution' as mitigating for white-collar defendants — there is no equivalent mitigator for a hungry job-seeker.

The Kim Young-ran Act draws bright lines at ₩1M per occurrence and ₩3M per period — bright lines that sophisticated defendants can engineer around, but ordinary low-rank officials cannot.

Under Korean law, judges judge themselves through the Judicial Ethics Committee — and the most common outcome for sitting-judge DUI is an internal reprimand that lets them keep deciding ordinary citizens' DUI cases.

Sentencing Commission drug guidelines anchor first-offense meth use at 10 months minimum — yet courts repeatedly find 'low social impact' factors that move chaebol heirs out of that range.

'Flight risk' justified denial of suspension for the migrant — yet the chairman's economic resources were never treated as flight risk, despite the much greater capacity to evade.

Tax-evasion guidelines key on amount; ten-times-more should mean a heavier sentence. 'Voluntary disclosure' and 'national affection' are mitigators that a small-shop owner cannot purchase.

Per-victim damage in the Lime/Optimus cases dwarfs the small online seller's, but procedural and 'cooperation' mitigators routinely shift large-scale white-collar fraud below baseline guideline ranges.

Sexual-violence guideline ranges are tight, but courts apply 'social contribution' and 'no prior record' as mitigators only the powerful can credibly claim — producing systemic gaps even within identical statutes.

The ₩1M threshold to lose a seat creates an incentive — and recurring pattern — for courts to assess fines just below it for incumbents while routinely exceeding it for newcomers.

Out-of-court settlement leverage scales with assets. The Special Act on Aggravated Punishment treats the conduct identically; courts repeatedly cite settlement and 'social contribution' to invert the outcome for high-asset defendants.

The 2021 Stalking Punishment Act was meant to standardize stalking sentences. Already, the data shows the same statute producing class-coded outcomes when 'voluntary withdrawal' and 'public service' read differently for different defendants.

The Capital Markets Act's per-amount escalation should make ₩30B harsher than ₩2B by every doctrinal measure. Restitution-based mitigators favor defendants who can repay quickly — a structural privilege for high-asset insiders.

Settlement payments toward 'spousal forgiveness' are a recurring lenient mitigator. When the structural power asymmetry inside a marriage is itself part of the harm, the law's reliance on 'spousal forgiveness' as a mitigator is itself a question.

When the harm is to data, individual liability scales linearly with records accessed; corporate liability scales toward an apology and a one-time fine. The same Personal Information Protection Act, applied at very different scales of personhood.