alt Hacker NewsHe'll be pardoned and released by the next election cycle, remember 2 presidents were even sentenced to death at one point.
I'm reading the comments here and surprised by the lack of depth of assessing Korea's history of prosecuting its presidents and most of you are just regurgitating what's reported in mainstream news that is echoed by Korean mainstream news which cannot give you a neutral impartial view on the situation.
Two Korean presidents were sentenced to death and were pardoned in the 90s. another two Korean presidents were jailed for decades and were released after a few years. All of this is just a quick pandering to voters for whichever side gets hold and I am willing to wager that the current and last President will also see the insides of a jail cell.
I point that democracies like American politics even when it gets ugly to the point do not engage in such tit for tat against the President to the point of sending them to jail, for obvious reasons.
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Yeah, I don't understand the comments praising Korea for this. A tradition of prosecuting political opponents and then pardoning all of them is a mockery of the rule of law, regardless of what they actually did.
> Two Korean presidents were sentenced to death and were pardoned in the 90s.
The important context is that these two presidents were Chun Doo-hwan and his successor Roh Tae-Woo, who led the military coup of December 12th (1979), seizing power, and then sending paratroopers to murder hundreds of civilians to quash public protest in the uprising of Gwangju (1980).
They weren't your garden variety corrupt politicians. They were mass murderers, and by 1995 when they were arrested, they and their military cabals were still posing a credible threat to Korea's democracy. Their arrest and subsequent death sentences, accompanied with a sweeping purge of their military cabal by president Kim Young-Sam, marked an important inflection point in Korea's decades-long struggle toward democracy: before that the threat of a military coup was a constant factor in politics. After that the threat was gone, and since then, the Korean military never even pretended they had any political ambitions.
So mock their later pardons if you want to, but you can't deny it marked an important and necessary step in Korea's history. It also shows sending your ex-presidents to prison only to pardon them later is still better than not bothering with it at all.
* Also, the "obvious reason" that American politics sent zero ex-presidents to prison is that Biden chickened out. So, there's that.
For more details on this, there's some really interesting documentaries on how the Chaebol system works.
In my personal opinion that's what the US is heading towards to right now, so might give you a hint on how to prevent it.
Yoon is quite politically toxic at the moment, I don't think he'll be pardoned any time soon. I also think that this would be a good moment for South Korea to reconsider its approach to corruption, especially since Yoon's actions represent a clear escalation in the history of corruption at the highest levels of government.