Further Notes from a Coffee Shop: The Penalty
The next morning, the retired gentleman was already sitting on the same bench before I could order my coffee. He opened the conversation with the question I had heard from almost every table in that coffee shop: they say the sentence is death, don’t they? A student in the corner nodded firmly, the motorbike-taxi driver beside him shook his head doubtfully, and the fritter seller said she had read it in a post, though she could not say whose. I brewed my coffee slowly, because a question that size should not be answered in a hurry. A coffee shop has no statutes, but it does have one good habit: it checks what is in the glass before drawing conclusions about the taste.
Let us separate two things that the timelines often mix up, like sugar and salt in a dark kitchen. The first is opinion. Many commentators and public figures do regard the alleged wiretapping of the President as linked to treason, and some say that the treason provisions carry the death penalty. The second is the official suspicion. According to the investigators and the government, the suspects are currently being charged under the provisions on wiretapping and interception in the new Criminal Code and under the Electronic Information and Transactions Law, with a maximum penalty of ten years’ imprisonment, and so far no treason provision has been used. So, for now, the death penalty is an opinion in circulation, not a recorded charge. Both may be debated at the coffee table, but only one of them may serve as the basis for a verdict.
The coffee shop has a simple rule for this: the menu and the bill. If we order a plate of fried rice, the owner may not charge us the price of lobster merely because another customer at the next table shouts that the fried rice ought to have been lobster. In criminal law the rule is much the same: a judge rules on the provisions that have been charged and proved in court, not on whichever provision is being called out loudest outside the building. That is what is known as the principle of legality, which keeps punishment from being decided by anger. The investigators and prosecutors may of course add or change the charges if they find new evidence, but that is a matter of proof, not of wishing. For now, as long as the provisions concern wiretapping, the highest penalty is already clearly written down, and while the process runs, the presumption of innocence continues to apply to everyone.
Of course, the word treason has a certain appeal. It is a big word that sounds like the strike of a gong, and whoever utters it at once sounds like a person who understands history. But courts do not love big words. Courts love evidence, and the heavier the provision, the heavier the elements that must be proved. Calling something treason on a timeline takes two seconds and one thumb. Proving it in court takes case files, witnesses, experts, and a patience rarely found in people who are angry. So I made one note in the margin of our coffee shop’s dictionary: the word that goes viral fastest is not always the word that stands strongest in the courtroom.
If we want to know how punishment has been handed down in history, we can learn from those who went before. Sejanus, in Rome two thousand years ago, was executed on the very day the emperor’s letter was read out in the Senate, with no lengthy trial and no chance of appeal. Kim Jae-gyu, who shot President Park Chung-hee in 1979, was sentenced to death and hanged in May 1980. Both lived in times when the law moved as fast as a change in the wind and bowed to the whims of rulers. From them we learn that a death sentence that falls quickly is seldom a sign of justice; it is more often a sign that the law is not yet fully free.
Peru offers a far more complicated picture. Vladimiro Montesinos, intelligence chief of the Fujimori era, was not sentenced to death, but the sentences that piled up over two decades leave him serving more than thirty years in prison. His first sentence, in 2002, was nine years for usurping a post he had never officially held. Then came 20 years in 2006 for selling illegal weapons to the FARC, and 15 years for several corruption cases. His heaviest sentence, 25 years, was imposed not for the bribery videos or the wiretaps but for the Barrios Altos massacre and the murder of the journalist Pedro Yauri. His superior, Fujimori, was sentenced to 25 years in 2009 over massacres carried out by the Grupo Colina death squad, in addition to his sentence for corruption. The lesson is plain: the recording scandal that brought down a government is not always the basis for the heaviest punishment, because the heaviest charges often come from other crimes uncovered afterwards.
In Turkey, the sentences in the Erdoğan wiretapping affair varied with the provisions used. In the case of the listening devices in the Prime Minister’s office and residence, two former police officers were each sentenced to seven years and six months’ imprisonment out of the 13 people tried, while eight defendants were acquitted of all charges. But in the mass trial that followed, 131 defendants received sentences ranging from three years and nine months to 45 years, and a former police intelligence chief was sentenced to 18 years for leading an armed terrorist organisation, on top of more than seven years for illegal wiretapping. The figures leapt once terrorism provisions entered the indictment. That is where the complication lies: the heavy sentences were handed down in an atmosphere of sweeping purges, and the defendants, along with some observers, considered the proceedings politically motivated. So the weight of a verdict is not necessarily the measure of a process’s fairness.
Mark Felt, the famous Deep Throat, lived out the most ironic fate of all. The man who helped bring down President Nixon over illegal surveillance was himself found guilty in November 1980 of conspiring to violate citizens’ civil rights through warrantless searches. The judge imposed a fine of 5,000 dollars and no prison term. His colleague, Edward Miller, was fined 3,500 dollars, and President Reagan pardoned both men in 1981 while their appeals were still pending.
Some call it wise justice; others call it proof that closeness to power is always useful, even after that power has changed hands.
South Korea shows the most careful road. President Yoon was sentenced to life imprisonment for leading an insurrection, not to the death penalty the prosecutors had sought. His defence minister was sentenced to 30 years and his national police chief to 12. The verdicts came through a long and open process, and some defendants were acquitted because their criminal intent had not been proved. Of all these stories, the death penalty fell in an era when the law was not yet free of the ruler, whereas in more settled countries even the heaviest verdicts must travel through statutes, evidence and appeals.
One question still hangs over our table, and it concerns not provisions but the person who placed the order: for whom, exactly, was all this done? The investigators have not answered it, the Palace admits it does not yet know the details of the motive, and the politicians can only ask in ever louder voices. Where answers are absent, speculation always grows like mushrooms in the rainy season. Some suppose this was a solo effort, some suppose it was the work of a gang, and some suppose there was another hand behind the scenes, whose hand nobody can say. Honest satire can note only one thing: the question is legitimate, but the answer is legitimate only if it is born of evidence. Pointing a finger without a case file is like setting off firecrackers in a paper warehouse. Let the investigators open the drawers one by one, and let the people wait patiently for whoever’s name is truly written inside, great or small, near or far, because good justice does not look at family photographs.
The conclusion from our coffee table today is therefore simple. Punishment is not determined by the size of public anger or the depth of the ruler’s sense of betrayal, but by the provision that is proved, the strength of the evidence, and the independence of the court. History’s range of punishments is very wide, from the gallows, to decades in prison, to fines and pardons, and the difference almost always comes from differences in provisions and in how a state treats its own law. That is why our own case too should be judged by the provisions that are eventually proved, not by whichever term is loudest on the timeline. The most expensive thing in a great case is not the sentence but the people’s trust that the process is clean.
As in the first part, we leave one note in the margin of the dictionary. This satire is aimed at the culture of insiders: the habit of treating power as personal property, a network of friends as a state institution, and closeness as immunity. It is not aimed at the President, who needs our support so that this country can keep running on the right track. We have made no suspect’s name a subject of mockery, because good mockery targets patterns, not persons. And we have passed no verdict, because a coffee shop has only a spoon that clinks against the rim of a glass, not a judge’s gavel.
The coffee in my glass was down to its grounds when that second conversation ended. I went home with a conviction a little calmer than yesterday’s: that anger may light a conversation, but only the law may close it. And once more, may Allah Subhanahu wa Ta’ala always protect President Prabowo Subianto, keep him healthy and safe, and strengthen him to lead this country with justice and trustworthiness. May this case also be handled openly, fairly and in accordance with the law, so that the guilty are punished in due measure. Amen, O Lord of the World.
