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Idiocy: The industrialized world’s worst judicial system makes its home in Korea. It places great emphasis on the extraction of confessions, which are a great short-cut to the truth for lazy jurists who’d rather jail the occasional innocent than hit the ground, investigate the facts, or perform a competent cross-examination. Its main truth-engine is a prosecutorial investigative service with powers of lengthy pre-trial detention without habeas corpus (and a few cattle prods, should the need arise). It tends to compensate for its tacitly acknowledged error rate with low sentences for anyone who confesses. This occasionally leads to obsence sentence disparities between the guilty and the maybe-not-guilty.

And South Korea’s justice minister is warning us that reforming this train wreck will lead to a the “birth of the mafia,” as if it wasn’t born decades ago. What lame demagoguery. And his implicit justification is that Koreans lie more than, say, Japanese. A classic case of a self-fulfilling inferiority complex.

Have South Koreans ever considered that the Number One obstacle to amending the SOFA is that it’s virtually impossible to get decent representation or a fair trial in a Korean court?