Lee Kun-hee (Samsung) was convicted, suspended, pardoned. His son Lee Jae-yong: convicted, suspended, briefly imprisoned, pardoned. Chey Tae-won (SK): convicted, imprisoned, pardoned. Chung Mong-koo (Hyundai): convicted, suspended, pardoned. Lee Jay-hyun (CJ): convicted, imprisoned briefly, pardoned twice. Kim Seung-youn (Hanwha): convicted, suspended, pardoned. Park Yong-sung (Doosan): convicted, suspended, pardoned. Shin Dong-bin (Lotte): convicted, suspended, pardoned.
Reading these names as a list rather than as individuals, a pattern is undeniable. The pardon is not exceptional. It is part of the expected lifecycle of a chaebol white-collar prosecution. The trial is the first stage; the pardon is the second; the third is the press release announcing the chairman's restored role.
This matters for proportionality analysis because it changes the unit being analyzed. Article 12 of the Constitution says punishment must be necessary, suitable, and balanced. The trial court can satisfy that test for its sentence at the moment it issues. But the *effective* sentence — the time actually served before normal life resumes — is determined by another tribunal, the executive, with very different inputs and very different politics. If the trial court's sentence is, in expectation, going to be reduced by half or more by political action, then the trial-court sentence is not the punishment. It is the opening offer in a multi-stage negotiation.
For the proportionality principle to do its work, the relevant comparison cannot be between trial-court sentences alone. It must be between effective sentences — between time actually served plus residual reputational and economic costs. By that measure, the gap between the chaebol heir and the small-fund manager is wider than the published verdicts suggest.
Fixing this is harder than fixing the trial-court guidelines. Pardon is a constitutional power; reform there requires either constitutional amendment or sustained political norms. Korean civil society has been arguing for the latter — for a normative claim that economic-contribution pardons no longer be politically tenable. Whether that norm holds depends on whether voters across administrations come to read each new chaebol pardon as a violation of the proportionality principle, rather than as routine governance.