The Silmido incident is the most painful example of how the state instrumentalized individuals and cruelly ended it. Those who were assigned the special mission of being agents of the Northern faction and endured extreme training, met the fate of Tosagupin in the name of maintaining secrecy when the nation's need disappeared. According to recently revealed testimony, the Ministry of National Defense gave them false hope that they would be dispatched to Vietnam, made them give up their appeal, and then carried out an elaborate deception by immediately executing the death penalty. Their final moments, at the threshold of death, shouting “Long Live Korean Independence” and pouring out resentment toward the nation, clearly prove how inhumane state violence can be in trampling on an individual’s life.

On the other hand, the 22nd Division shooting incident, which occurred as a result of a combination of individual deviation and irrationality within the unit, clearly revealed the chronic ills of our society's military culture. The anger that grew in a tragic environment of group bullying and class exclusion eventually exploded into gunshots against his colleagues, which resulted in the perpetrator becoming the last inmate on death row in Korea. In addition, the cases of those who were wrongfully killed in executions after being implicated in fabricated espionage cases during the past military regime warn how many innocent people can be sacrificed when the judiciary is reduced to a handmaiden of power. In this way, depending on the times, the death penalty has become a bastion of national security or a political murder tool to secure the legitimacy of the regime.

In modern times, the center of gravity of judicial judgment is shifting to the brutal crimes of individuals and the constitutional destruction of those in power. Recent cases of revenge murders for sexual crimes are accompanied by elaborate criminal methods such as stalking and abuse of the judicial system, causing social outrage, and the court is sounding a social alarm by imposing severe punishments of life imprisonment or higher. At the same time, the special prosecutor's investigation into former President Yoon Seok-yeol's alleged rebellion has emerged as the hottest potato in our modern history. The charge of threatening the National Assembly and the National Election Commission by mobilizing military forces is directly related to the crime of leading a rebellion, for which the legal punishment is death, and this creates a historical irony in that the violence committed by the state in the past has been reproduced by those in power today.

The controversy surrounding the death penalty goes beyond simply paying the price for a crime; it touches on the philosophical question of whether the state has the authority to take life. As seen in the past Reporting League incident and the manipulation spy case, when a state makes an error in its decision, the result remains a permanent tragedy that can never be undone. As seen in appellate court rulings such as the Baek Rak-jeong case, even the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's efforts to correct past mistakes are met with obstacles in the legal process, and the suffering of the bereaved families is repeated. When the judiciary ignores the truth due to political interests or procedural formalism, the country loses its own moral legitimacy, and the damage falls squarely on the people.