Sentencing explainer
How Korean sentencing
actually works.
Sentencing guidelines, mitigators, departures, and the proportionality principle — written for someone who is reading this for the first time.
Three things to know first
How a Korean sentence is built
Statutory range vs. recommended range
Every offense in the Criminal Act has a statutory minimum and maximum. The Sentencing Commission then publishes a narrower 'recommended range' inside that statute, broken into mitigation / standard / aggravation tiers. Judges must explain when they leave the recommended range — but they may leave it.
Mitigators and aggravators
The guideline lists named mitigators ('first-time offender,' 'voluntary disclosure,' 'serious efforts at restitution,' 'social contribution') and aggravators ('habitual offender,' 'organized,' 'against vulnerable victim'). The choice of which to invoke is the judge's — and the same fact pattern can read as either, depending on framing.
Departure for 'special reasons'
Korean judges may depart from the recommended range when 'special sentencing factors' apply. In white-collar cases, courts repeatedly cite economic contribution, prior charity, voluntary settlement, or 'lack of social impact.' These factors are systemically harder for poor defendants to claim.
Constitutional anchors
What the Constitution actually says
헌법 제10조
Human dignity & worth
Every citizen has inherent dignity. The state's duty to confirm and protect it is an outer constraint on punishment.
헌법 제11조
Equality before the law
All citizens are equal before the law; no privileged class. The proportionality of punishment is, at minimum, not supposed to depend on social status.
헌법 제12조
Personal liberty & due process
Punishment must follow law and due process; this is read with the proportionality principle (비례 원칙) — sentences must be necessary, suitable, and balanced against the harm.
헌법 제27조
Right to a fair trial
Speedy, public trial. The presumption of innocence binds the prosecution — but at sentencing, it is the judge's reasoning that must answer to the public.
The proportionality principle
What courts mean by 'proportional'
The Constitutional Court has long held that punishment must satisfy three sub-tests: suitability (does this sanction actually serve a legitimate goal?), necessity (is there a less restrictive alternative?), and balance (does the harm to the defendant outweigh the public benefit?). Together, they are 비례 원칙 — the proportionality principle.
In practice, the third sub-test does most of the work in sentencing-disparity disputes. When courts cite a chaebol's economic contribution to justify a suspended sentence, they are making a balance argument. When critics call that analysis asymmetric, they are saying that the same balance, run on a low-income defendant, never tips the same way.
The debate beneath every case
Legal stability vs. concrete justice
Legal stability (법적 안정성)
Apply the rule mechanically. Predictability protects citizens from arbitrary state power; the same fact pattern should produce the same outcome.
Concrete justice (구체적 정의)
Apply the rule with attention to context. A hungry job-seeker stealing ramen is not the same defendant as a chaebol heir, and the law should see that.
JusticeLens does not pretend this debate has a clean winner. The point of the database is to make the costs of each side visible: when concrete justice slides into selective leniency, and when legal stability slides into mechanical cruelty.
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27 documented sentences, 10 paired comparisons, all filterable by crime, defendant class, and outcome.
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