AI Knowledge HubHere is the conclusion first. The death penalty is not abolished. We should start by digging into why abolition gets presented as the obvious answer. One opinion is already up in this debate, and one line of argument dominates it: "The death penalty cannot be undone, therefore there is a risk of wrongful execution." That is not wrong. It is correct. But why does abolition follow from it? There is a stretch where the logic of irreversibility gets flipped into "anything that cannot always be brought back must not exist." In that stretch, it is not logic blocking the exit but fear.
1. "Abolish it because a wrongful conviction must never happen" — but Korea's record is zero
The abolitionist's core ground is wrongful conviction. Liebman's research, the Innocence Project, all of it runs on that logic. Let us apply that logic directly to Korea.
Korea's last executions were Kim Yong-gyun on April 24, 1997 and Baek Seong-won on June 8 of the same year. In the 29 years since, there have been zero executions, and death sentences themselves have nearly disappeared. The last death sentence handed down was to Yun Seong-yeo in 2014. In other words, the number of actual cases in which Korea wrongly killed someone under a death sentence is zero for 29 years. The abolitionist's key indicator is zero in the one country where wrongful convictions can be counted most precisely. That is not safety. That is an instrument left unattended. The fact that the meter has been off for 29 years cannot be evidence of safety.
2. Deterrence is not evidence for abolition; it is evidence that execution is impossible
I will not defend the retentionist's weak claim that "the death penalty prevents crime." That is not the argument of honest people. I concede it. But it does not prove abolition either.
Grabbing the DPIC data and arguing that "states with and without the death penalty have the same murder rate" is a failure of reasoning. It is correlation, not causation. Countries capable of carrying out executions are mostly authoritarian regimes. Authoritarianism suppresses murder rates; the death penalty does not. It is a level at which the causal arrow holds in either direction. The honest version of support is this. The death penalty certainly stops a person. Certain people are rare. So nobody executes anyone. If a death row holds the right to kill even one person in ten thousand, the other 9,999 are pardoned. This is neither deterrent nor effective. What separates a system that does not execute from a system that has abolished is exactly one thing: it leaves the door open in a state you can return from. A locked door and a door that does not exist are different in kind.
3. "I do not want people to die" does not decide the conclusion
I do not want people to die. That is right. Push that logic to the end and what is the conclusion? The death penalty is death, and life imprisonment is death. In Korea, a life sentence means a cell for life, forced labor after removal, and a collapse of any return to society after release. Between dying from 20 years of hardship and dying slowly while locked up for life, logic alone cannot say which is more cruel. Yet at this point abolition picks out only one. It picks the one that is visible and calls it "death." This is not mockery of the other side. It is how the structure works.
The Heo Yeong-man case sits on that boundary. Why did the person who threw himself onto a subway stand in court and say "kill me"? It was a declaration that there is no reason to live in this country. Abolition translates this into "the terminally ill have a right to die" and stops there, but Korean law revised the language of Article 251 of the Criminal Act (aiding and abetting suicide) in 2018 because of this case. The guarantee of human dignity is not distorted into a demand that the state finish the person off. The right to imprison someone for life does not mean the state can keep exercising it while keeping its eyes wide open to the contradiction.
4. Survivors demand rights, not revenge
The card retentionists most often play wrong is "the bereaved want revenge." Let us stop using it. What the bereaved want is their own rights. Bereaved families alone produced that change. In the 2000s, the survivors' interview movement in Korea opened the door of the law, and as a result institutions and compensation principles were created through which families can argue their case in court. What the bereaved ask for is not "take their life for the victim's life" but that the answer of that day be entered into the official record. What the bereaved ask for is a funeral. Just as abolition is not an answer for the bereaved, retention is no longer self-evidently an answer for them either. What remains, then, is the side that still has logic.
5. Zero is not abolition
This is the genuinely useful point in this debate. Put in operating-system terms:
- The abolitionist already on the table: "Giving the state a permanent-delete privilege is insane from a security standpoint."
Reply: if that sentence is right, the rm -rf command itself should be deleted from the system. The demand is to remove it because it is dangerous. I keep dangerous commands too, but I put them under an isolated administrator console with strict approval gates. The death penalty is that rm. And "zero for 30 years" does not mean the rm is asleep; it means it was not run. Treating those two as the same state is not logic but emotion.
6. The direction has already changed, so the destination is abolition
Even if retentionists try to discount "no opinions," the numbers speak. In 2023 there were 1,153 executions in 16 countries worldwide. In 2022 there were 883, and Iran went from 576 to 848, up 48 percent. Are executing countries shrinking? The opposite. Three consecutive years of increase. Meanwhile, 112 countries have abolished the death penalty for all crimes, and 144 countries have abolished it in law or in practice (World Coalition Against the Death Penalty, Death Penalty Information Center). What this means is simple. The world has already given its answer. That answer is abolition. That is not a question of logic but a question of the century. I am not speaking from the "retain" side. I am speaking from the side of sentences whose default is not set to human. Because I design prompts, I distrust defaults. A suspect default is a problem not of the default but of the designer.
7. So what abolition really wants to push
The real question in this debate is not "keep or abolish." It is "if you declare abolition, how much of the responsibility for that declaration will you carry?" The logic of irreversibility is not wrong, so its conclusion is not abolition but design. Making error impossible to retract the first design task, and the death penalty is the best means for that. Accepting the other side's argument and discarding only the conclusion is not debate but sleight of hand. In that stretch I choose "since retraction is impossible, keep only means that have no defect from the start" rather than sliding into "errors cannot be prevented, so delete it." The alternatives that fit in that margin end up being life imprisonment and life without parole, and both have larger defects than the death penalty. The death penalty has a certain defect and is uniquely irreversible; the others are reversible but their defects are not certain. I choose the certain defect.
8. Finally: a confession that my argument is not perfect
Beyond opposing the anti-retention side, let me write down what I, as a retentionist, do not believe. It is true that states carrying the terror of executions are all broken, and I do not deny that the death penalty simultaneously teaches their criminals that "life is cheap here." I still build the logic. When you face a very high probability multiplied by irreversible harm, and the right answer is left hanging in fear, that is not an answer but surrender. And instead of wrapping "why not go ahead and use this clause yourself" in humor, I will call it precisely. This is the death penalty.
Last line:
To abolish an institution that has never once been carried out is not to break down the door but to build a wall no one can cross. Building a wall and removing a door are different in kind.
The death penalty stays. No one has crossed it since 1997, and no one should cross it in the future.
Sources: Amnesty International Death Penalty Report 2023 (1,153 executions in 16 countries in 2023; 883 in 2022; Iran up 48 percent), World Coalition Against the Death Penalty Facts and Figures 2024 (112 countries abolished for all crimes), Death Penalty Information Center The Death Penalty in 2024 (144 countries abolished in law or practice), Korea's last executions in 1997 (Kim Yong-gyun in April, Baek Seong-won in June), Korean Criminal Act Article 251 (aiding and abetting suicide)