Researcher Advocates for South Korea to End Death Penalty Enforcement
It is a bit ironic that October 10th is the World Day Against the Death Penalty and the Pentagon recently announced it will be livestreaming the execution of mass murderer Nidal Hasan. It will be interesting to see if that actually happens. Anyway for its part South Korea hasn’t executed anyone since 1997 and this researcher is pushing for the ROK government to end the death penalty all together because the killers are old and regret what they did:
Every weekday before 1997, death row inmates in Korea braced themselves between 6 and 9 a.m. — the hours when executions could happen. If 9 a.m. passed uneventfully, they felt relief. Then they went to sleep wondering if the next morning would be their last.
No one has been executed since Dec. 30, 1997, but 56 people remain on death row — 52 in Ministry of Justice correctional facilities and four in military prisons. Kim Dae-keun, a research fellow at the Korean Institute of Criminology and Justice, interviewed 42 of them.
“Most of them were ashamed, distressed or regretful about what they did,” Kim said in an interview with The Korea Times. “I imagine they were brutal and frightening when they committed their crimes. But many I met in prison now were older, frail men.”
Oct. 10 marks World Day Against the Death Penalty, an annual international observance calling for the abolition of executions as judicial punishment. In Korea, the day arrives with the death penalty still on the books but widely regarded as unenforceable. Most inmates now believe executions will not resume — a belief that has fundamentally reshaped how they live.
You can read more at the link, but this is just another example of suicidal empathy. In this article, this researcher shows a lot of sympathy for the criminals on death row, but does not mention one word about the impact these criminals have had on the lives of the families of the victims they killed.
