(Law firm of Saram & Saram, Woo-shyk Choi)
Recently, a university student was killed by a knife in Sinchon in Seoul. What was surprising was the criminals were 15, 16 and 18 years old. 5 months ago, 16 high school students raped a mentally weakened female middle school student, but they just received probation as juvenile offenders from the court. Young offenders are criminals under 19, and Korean criminal law does not punish offenders younger than 14 severely. However, criminals 10 and older than 10, who are called ‘breaking the law boys’, can receive a probation penalty, and boys from 14 to 19 can receive a criminal penalty or a probation penalty as juvenile offenders. Lately, many people are insisting that more severe penalties are needed for juvenile offenders. They do not receive legal penalties often, or they receive the lowest penalties as they are too young. Therefore, they no longer have a sense of guilt, and it does not prevent them from hurting others in the future.
What about the United State of America(U.S.A.), which is a developed country? Last year, the Wisconsin State Supreme Court convicted a 14-year-old boy to life imprisonment without parole for killing his friend by pushing his friend off of a parking building. The counsel claimed that considering the culprit's age at that time of the accident, the ruling was too brutal and against the Eighth Amendment which bans excessive penalties, but it was not accepted. The law system of the U.S.A. sticks to its principle, an eye for an eye. The U.S.A. lowered the sentence from the death penalty to life imprisonment in 2005. Now, about 2,400 juvenile offenders are imprisoned for lifetime in America.
The number of juvenile offenders almost doubled from 6,060 in 2005 to 11,609 in 2009, and the rate of violent crimes such as robbery and rape is over 13%. Furthermore, the second conviction rate for juvenile offenders grew to 38.3% in 2010. It is hard to expect victims and their families to tolerate criminals as juvenile offenders receive weak penalties, even though their crimes are cruel, because they are younger than 14. The court extraordinarily sentenced 2 students to 2 years and 3 years each for assailing a victim in case of the middle school students’ suicide in Daegu. The judiciary system seems to recognize the seriousness in that they have given only the least penalty for bullying. Most advanced countries such as the United Kingdom and the U.S.A. tend to punish juvenile offenders more strictly regardless of age. The Korean legal system needs to lower its minimal age of criminal penalty to 12 considering that youths are growing faster than before and that law was set up in 1953.