Summary
The past catches up with Eun-seok as her personal and professional lives begin to dovetail.
This recap of Juvenile Justice season 1, episode 9 contains spoilers.
Eun-seok wakes up in hospital after her impromptu collapse at the end of the previous episode, and while she seems to remember what caused her to fall, she keeps quiet about it. The doctor decides it’s simply burnout and exhaustion, and it’s easy to make a case for that. When Tae-ju tenderly takes her home, he finds her fridge bare aside from a couple of bottles of water, and the entire place unfurnished aside from a mattress on the floor and stacks of books and case files. Her spartan existence must be dangerous. She does nothing but work — it seems like she doesn’t even eat. While he lets her sleep, Tae-ju also leaves a delivery of some groceries at her front door in a nice gesture of kindness.
Juvenile Justice season 1, episode 9 recap
Anyway, the case. The victim’s name is Kang Seon-a, and she was raped by several boys while badly intoxicated, meaning that her story is already hazy without the threat that any inconsistencies will invalidate it. Hwang In-jun was indicted as one of the perpetrators, but DNA evidence backs up his claim that he didn’t participate in the sexual assault. Eun-seok, though, is adamant that she take the case, despite Geun-hee trying to reassign it, and throughout the episode, we begin to learn why.
This is the long-awaited point when Eun-seok’s personal and professional lives begin to dovetail. After having seen her apartment, Tae-ju takes more of an interest in her background, which seems to barely even exist. She has no family, no connections, and when he mentions this to her, she claims to have abandoned her family. But as we learn more about Hwang In-jun, we also learn more about her. He’s a serial offender, and five years prior, he killed someone by dropping a brick from the roof of a building. That “someone” was Eun-seok’s son. And the judge presiding over the case was Geun-hee. She barely remembers In-jun, but Eun-seok hasn’t forgotten and is determined to achieve some measure of revenge.
This is obviously the root of Eun-seok’s disdain for young offenders. She has never forgiven the system for In-jun getting away with her son’s death. It’s why she left her prosecutor husband, who arrives to tell her to recuse herself from the case or he’ll inform the courts of her connection to the supposed perpetrator. It’s why all she does is work, and why she places such an emphasis on giving juvenile delinquents the maximum possible sentence. Now’s her chance to right a wrong that has completely shaped her worldview.
In-jun’s defense claims that he participated only because he was petrified of the other boys, and that he tried to intervene when he realized the severity of the crime they were about to commit. He seems sincere. Detective Ko Gang-sik, the cop who has appeared in a few episodes, is a witness in the case. A recording that was discussed earlier, of In-jun gloating to the victim’s father, isn’t admissible as evidence, but Eun-seok was able to return to the crime scene and recover dashcam footage from a taxi that was parked across the road from the construction site where the crime took place. The footage shows, clearly, that all three boys, including In-jun, entered the crime scene, which doesn’t match his claims that he never did out of protest. If he was lying about that, he could have been lying about everything else, so the case is going to be investigated further.
Tae-ju delivers some late news. While Seon-a was scared out of changing her testimony, her claims that there was an additional boy present might well be valid, and there’s a good chance that the boy might have been Baek Do-hyeon, the boy In-jun was with when he threw the brick that killed Eun-seok’s son. Just as Eun-seok is given this news, she’s also confronted by her mother-in-law, who slaps her in front of everyone and makes a giant scene about her ruining her son’s life. Immediately, the whole court is talking about it. And suddenly, Eun-seok’s chances of achieving the justice she so craves seem less likely than ever.
You can stream Juvenile Justice season 1, episode 9 exclusively on Netflix.
