Mechanical application of the law has a profound moral case behind it. It is what protects ordinary citizens from arbitrary state power. If the rule is the rule, the rich cannot quietly receive softer rules. The proportionality principle's strongest reading — punishment determined by harm and only harm — is mechanical, and it is mechanical for a reason.
Contextual application also has a profound moral case. A starving 22-year-old who steals ten ramen packs is not the same defendant as a habitual thief; punishing them identically is its own form of cruelty. The 비례 원칙 also has a humane reading: that the balance test should weigh the defendant's circumstances, not just their offense.
The trouble is that, in Korea's data, the mechanical reading and the contextual reading are not applied symmetrically. Mechanical application is what convicts the bus driver. Contextual application is what suspends the chairman's sentence. The defendants whose context is read as mitigating tend to be the ones who already had the most context to draw from.
This is not an argument against contextual judgment. It is an argument for symmetric contextual judgment — for the proposition that if the court can read a chairman's investments into 'circumstances after the offense,' it can read a job-seeker's hunger the same way. JusticeLens does not pretend to settle the philosophical debate. It tries, with as much data as we can pull, to make the asymmetry visible.