형사사법제도의 변화와 공익 — 검찰청 폐지와 검･경 수사권 조정을 중심으로 —

This article examines, in an integrated manner, two major rounds of criminal justice reform implemented in Korea over the past five years: (1) the reallocation of investigative authority between prosecutors and police that took effect on 1 January 2021, and (2) the 1 October 2025 amendment to the Government Organization Act, which abolishes public prosecutors’ offices and establishes the Prosecution Office and the Serious Crimes Investigation Office (SCIO). Its primary objective is to analyze how these institutional changes have affected actual investigative practice and the protection of the public interest, and to suggest directions for future institutional design. The empirical analysis highlights three main features. First, when prosecutorial caseload statistics are read together with police crime statistics, the total volume of state investigation appears to have decreased significantly after the reallocation of powers. Given that a single case can be counted multiple times as it circulates between police and prosecution through requests for supplementary investigation and reinvestigation, this suggests that the actual investigative capacity of the state has shrunk even more than the official numbers indicate. Second, although statistical indicators show that average case-processing times have not markedly increased, and even appear to have shortened in some categories, this is largely an artefact of fragmented counting. In practice, the duration required to dispose of a single case tends to be extended by repeated requests for supplementary investigation and reinvestigation, causing delays commonly referred to as “case ping-pong.” Third, the abolition of the prosecutor’s power to direct investigations and its replacement with a set of limited, formalized powers—requests for supplementary investigation, reinvestigation, corrective measures, and transfer—has weakened the effectiveness of judicial and quasi-judicial control, thereby heightening the risk of rights violations and investigative gaps. Building on this diagnosis, the article then considers the additional problems likely to arise when the abolition of public prosecutors’ offices and the creation of the SCIO and the Prosecution Office are superimposed on this landscape. While the SCIO (under the Ministry of the Interior and Safety) and the Prosecution Office (under the Ministry of Justice) are designed to institutionalize the separation of investigation and prosecution, they raise complex issues regarding the relationship with the executive in political and high-level corruption cases, the independence of command and supervision structures, and the transfer and cultural entrenchment of the prosecutorial expertise accumulated under the previous system. The coexistence of multiple investigative and prosecutorial bodies—police, SCIO, the Corruption Investigation Office for High-Ranking Officials, various special judicial police, and the Prosecution Office—is also likely to exacerbate disparities in investigative capacity, jurisdictional conflicts, delays caused by transfers, victim dissatisfaction, and the procedural complexity faced by suspects and defense counsel. Although the Prosecution Office’s ex post review of cases forwarded to it can function as an additional safeguard for victims, it may at the same time undermine the overall predictability and accountability of the system. Finally, the article reconceptualizes the criminal justice system as a “public-interest realization system” and proposes normative benchmarks for future reform. Public interest is understood not as an abstract “state interest,” but as a condition in which constitutional rights, the maintenance of legal order, and the long-term interests of community members are harmonized. Accordingly, the criminal justice system should be designed and evaluated in light of (1) predictability and consistency that enable citizens to foresee which body will investigate and prosecute under what standards; (2) a proper balance between rights protection and effective crime control; (3) substantive public interest viewed from the standpoint of citizens rather than institutional self-interest; and (4) public trust in the operation of criminal justice, including in politically sensitive cases. From this perspective, the article argues that the abolition of public prosecutors’ offices and the introduction of the SCIO–Prosecution Office model should not remain a mere “redistribution of institutional powers,” but must instead be reconfigured so as to strengthen the public-interest functions of the criminal justice system as a whole.