In the Korean Sentencing Commission's official methodology, harm amount is the most heavily weighted factor in property-crime guidelines. A defendant who embezzled ₩100 million faces a heavier recommended sentence than one who embezzled ₩50 million; this is straightforward, mechanical, and right.
Which is what makes the gap between our pair-1 cases so striking. The bus driver who failed to deposit ₩2,400 in fare collections lost his career — and the Supreme Court affirmed that outcome was proportionate. Lee Jae-yong, who was found to have orchestrated bribery worth ₩8.6 billion, received a suspended sentence and was ultimately pardoned.
The ratio of harm: 3,583,333 to one. The ratio of effective punishment: a working-class livelihood ended versus a continued role at the top of one of the world's largest conglomerates.
No one argues this is the same crime. They argue something stronger: that whatever else explains the gap — the economic-contribution doctrine, the procedural texture of bribery vs. embezzlement, the political economy of chaebol cases — the gap cannot be explained by harm. And once you say that, the proportionality principle has been replaced by something else.
The interesting question is what it has been replaced *with*. Many critics call it pure class bias. The more careful version is structural: chaebol defendants can credibly invoke mitigators (economic contribution, settlement capacity, charitable donations, treatment programs, social standing) that ordinary defendants cannot. The mitigator system is not class-blind. The data shows it.