fate of the Sewol captain

It's been a while since I've written anything about the ill-fated Sewol ferry that sank this past April, taking about 300 people—mostly students—with it. The ferry's despicable coward of a captain had potentially faced the death penalty, but the verdict is now in, and it's thirty-six years in prison for the bastard. He's in his sixties, so unless he gets paroled early or something, he'll be spending the rest of his natural life in jail.

Earlier on, my own feeling was that Captain Lee Jun-seok deserved to be flayed and roasted slowly, with dogs gnawing on his entrails right before he gave up the ghost. But I find that I'm actually OK with this sentence: Captain Lee deserves to suffer a long, long time. He can spend the remainder of his life denying any wrongdoing, but my hope is that he'll be tortured by the ghosts of all those lost children and will contrive a way to commit suicide in jail. He's a piece of garbage. My mother, who used to love shouting at the TV whenever the news reported on some scumbag or other, would have barked, "Chop him into two thousand pieces!" Sorry, Mom, but that fate would have been too brief and merciful for this asshole. It's too bad he's not serving time in an American prison: his remaining years would be painful, indeed.

As things stand, I'm not among the people outraged that Captain Lee's sentence wasn't stiffer. Thirty-six years is good enough for me. I take grim satisfaction in knowing that this killer of children, this walking incarnation of the sin of omission, will languish in jail until he unburdens the world of his foul presence. There's some measure of justice in that.


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