The Report on Human Rights Situation in the Republic of Korea A deterrent to crime is an issue often dealt with during the death penalty discussions. The Constitutional Court, in its decision to uphold the death penalty in 2010, acknowledged that the death penalty is a deterrence to crimes by stating that permanently blocking the possibility of the repeated crimes of a criminal who has committed heinous crimes is protecting society. In reality, the people for the death penalty emphasize that the death penalty can prevent violent crimes by instilling fear in the general public. The death penalty being a deterrence to crimes can be seen in the result of the survey conducted by the NHRCK in 2018. People in favor of maintaining the death penalty responded that ‘heinous crimes will increase once the death penalty is abolished (23.5%),’ and that ‘crimes can be deterred by instilling the fear of punishment to other criminals (23.3%).’ However, the death penalty’s preventative or deterrent effect has not been verified, neither in Korea nor overseas. In the case of Korea, during the 10 years from 2009 to 2018, when the death penalty was not executed, murder was reduced by 41.3% and robbery by 87.3%. Moreover, according to the interviews of 32 people on death row by the Korean Institution of Criminology and Justice in 2019, most of the people on death row did not think about the punishment when committing the crime, and they were either drunk or extremely mad. Even those who thought about the punishment, did so only after they had committed the crime. The last consideration is the death penalty sentenced due to a misjudgment. For example in Korea, the victims of the ‘incident of the committee for the rebuilding of the People’s Revolutionary Party,‘ who were sentenced to the death penalty by the Supreme Court in 1974 with the sentence being carried out in less than one day after the sentencing, were found innocent in a 2007 appeal, and the people who were executed for collaborating with the North Korean army during the early days of the Korean War in 1950 were found innocent 70 years after their execution. According to the data from the Death Penalty Information Center, 162 people on 18