We live in a world in which the Biden Administration used the Law to abuse Jan 6 protestors; in which English judges are using the Law to crush an inconvenient individual like Tommy Robinson; in which mere judges in Romania misuse the Law to decide who may be allowed to run in a democratic election; in which self-aggrandizing judges in the US hide behind the Law as they to try to usurp government. We seem to be reaching a world in which many citizens no longer have any cause to believe that Law has much relation to Justice. The consequences for society are likely to be very severe.
Consequently, it would be reasonable to guess that South Korean TV dramas would be very negative about Courts & the Law. After all, the standard assumptions of many Korean dramas are that the Political Class is corrupt, officialdom is bought off or incompetent, and media figures are venal & self-promoting. “The Killing Vote” (2023) – 12 episodes of about 1 hour each – certainly incorporates all those premises. Interestingly, however, the drama presents no assertions about corruption or incompetence on the part of Big Law & the Courts – it is simply that the legal system is not fit for purpose, does not deliver justice, and has lost the confidence of the population. Just another straw in the wind that the Far Left’s long march through the institutions has successfully rotted out the foundations of society.
The focus of the drama is a mysterious masked figure who hacks South Korean mobile phone systems and offers people the opportunity to vote on whether some wrongdoer who has escaped proper judgment by the Courts should be executed. Apparently most young people in Korea do not bother to vote in elections, but they happily vote for the extra-judicial killing of individuals whose crimes were not adequately punished by the Law.
In good conscience, I cannot recommend this serial. It has its moments – such as the exuberantly drunken dinner held by the police team – but there are too many improbabilities, too many coincidences, and too much over-acting in this rather “girly” production for it to be taken seriously.
That is unfortunate, because in different hands this drama could have been excellent. The mysterious masked figure and his Killing Vote somehow tie back to events which happened 8 years earlier, when the young daughter of a law professor was brutally murdered. The investigating detective was convinced he had identified the perpetrator, but the legal case was weak. Pursuing his own vision of justice, the detective fabricated incriminating evidence. When that fabrication was identified in court, the suspect was found Not Guilty. Then the law professor, cleaving to his own view of justice, murdered the released suspect. The law professor went to jail – and later found out he had murdered the wrong person. Just imagine the tragedy Will Shakespeare could have written starting with that scenario!