"Oh Happy Times"
Authoress Gong Ji-young has written a new novel of that title about the death penalty. Below is a picture of her, and a synopsis of her book, from Gong's novel on death penalty opens up new possibility:

Yu-jeong is a professor at a college in Seoul not because she's really into the art but because she was born into a wealthy family. Yu-jeong was forced to attend an obscure university in Paris, and her father, who is on the board of the Korean university, pulled some strings to appoint her as a professor.

But her life seems to be a mess. She doesn't have any will to live. And three failed suicide attempts have made her life more miserable. Her aunt, a Catholic nun, leads Yu-jeong into a strange place: a prison cell block where death-row inmates wait for the last day of their life.

Yu-jeong meets one of them willy-nilly. His name is Yun-su, a criminal who committed heinous crimes and is sentenced to death. Despite their starkly different backgrounds, the two begin to communicate with each other, and the momentum comes when they realize both deeply resent the "unfair" world at large.

Yu-jeong has a troubling past. She was raped by her cousin when she was a young girl, but her mother, who urgently needed influence and power from the cousin's family, did not care about her daughter's pain and attempted to hide the incident.

Yu-jeong cannot forgive her cruel mother and the equally heartless world. The social values such as love and trust sound utterly meaningless for her.

Yun-su was born to a poor family. His father was an alcoholic and his mother ran away from the poverty-stricken life. Yun-su was often beaten by his father for no apparent reason, and his younger brother went blind due to the abuse.

When his father committed suicide, Yun-su and his blind brother were moved to an orphanage. Eventually, Yun-su lost his brother on the street because they had no money and no power to stand on their feet. Yun-su couldn't forgive the unfair world that made his life hopeless and, more importantly, turned him into a death-row inmate.

Yu-jeong and Yun-su find sadness in each other. And they change each other, a turning point that pushes the story forward with a powerful force. Author Gong places the death penalty system into their tragic love, raising the question about whether people can justify "legal murder" in order to preserve social justice.

While Yu-jeong and Yun-su slowly reconcile with the unfair world and even forgive the cruel world, the day of the much-dreaded "legal murder" comes abruptly.

I'm of two minds on the death penalty. It is not intrinsically wrong, but in applicatiom it often is. Catholics cannot disagree about abortion or euthanasia, but can about this issue, as this article about the Virginia gubernatorial race linked to by The Catholic Report today illustrates: Differing on death penalty: Both are Catholic, but Kaine opposes capital punishment while McDonnell supports it.

For the record, here's what Paragraph # 2297 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church has to say on the subject

Assuming that the guilty party's identity and responsibility have been fully determined, the traditional teaching of the Church does not exclude recourse to the death penalty, if this is the only possible way of effectively defending human lives against the unjust aggressor.

If, however, non-lethal means are sufficient to defend and protect people's safety from the aggressor, authority will limit itself to such means, as these are more in keeping with the concrete conditions of the common good and are more in conformity to the dignity of the human person.

Today, in fact, as a consequence of the possibilities which the state has for effectively preventing crime, by rendering one who has committed an offense incapable of doing harm - without definitely taking away from him the possibility of redeeming himself - the cases in which the execution of the offender is an absolute necessity "are very rare, if not practically non-existent."