death penalty

Impunity and discretionary justice

Rodrigo Duterte, Ronald Dela Rosa, Manny Pacquiao, and Koko Pimentel
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The phrase “heinous crimes,” for which death is their preferred penalty, falls often from the mouths of the advocates of state-sponsored murder, whether capital punishment, or the use of extrajudicial killings against suspected drug users and pushers as well as lawyer, student, farmer and worker activists and regime critics. Include in this lot certain senators and congressmen, the police and military, some judges, and, of course, the current president of this endangered republic.

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Death wish

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No, he doesn’t want to die; he just wants others put to death.

Boxer Manny Pacquiao, whose fists made him a part-time, occasional senator of this unfortunate Republic, says he’s going to rush the restoration of the death penalty through a bill in the Senate by the end of the year.

He’s been campaigning for it both in support of his own views as well as his patron President Rodrigo Duterte’s preference for it as a supposed deterrent to crime. Mr. Duterte is on record as saying that the method of execution he favors is hanging, because he wants it to be as painful and as inhumane as possible on the mindless assumption that it will frighten murderers, rapists, kidnappers, drug traffickers and other savages into abandoning their lives of crime.

Pacquiao says he’ll hold hearings on the proposed bill restoring capital punishment to determine whether the public wants it revived, 12 years after it was abolished in 2006 during the Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo presidency.

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Promoting impunity

Rodrigo Duterte for death penalty
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THE campaign by President Rodrigo Duterte and his allies in Congress for the restoration of the death penalty is replete with irony. Capital punishment is supposed to discourage criminality while at the same time insuring that those who commit certain crimes get what they deserve. But what’s likely is that rather than deter crime and assure crime victims of justice, it will further strengthen the impunity, or exemption from punishment, of the powerful, privileged, and well-connected.

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Deterring crime

Detail from Pisanello's Saint George and the Princess
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President-elect Rodrigo Duterte’s reiteration of a campaign promise to have Congress restore the death penalty resonates among most Filipinos who’re justly concerned with, and are in fact terrified by, the crimes that almost daily threaten their homes, their property and their lives and those of their kin. The number of rapes has nearly doubled, say women’s groups, and murders, kidnappings, assaults, and robberies have been multiplying, even as the drug trade destroys entire families. Outrage over these crimes’ persistence and their going unpunished is not limited to the survivors and kin of the victims. The demand for retribution cuts across classes but is especially strong among the students, professionals, office employees, and graveyard shift workers who feel they’re most vulnerable, and who are the most common crime victims.

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Inflexible

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COMMISSION on Human Rights chair Loretta Rosales was right: the death penalty has no place in any legal system — make that in any civilized legal system — but the rest of her statement the day after Sally Ordinario-Villanueva and Ramon Credo were executed in Xiamen, China, and Elizabeth Batain in Shenzhen, also in China, was off the mark.

Rosales issued a statement condemning the death penalty, but also declared that Ordinario-Villanueva, Credo and Batain had been “twice victimized,” first by the drug syndicates that used them, supposedly without their knowledge, to smuggle drugs abroad, and second by the “inflexibilities” of the Chinese judicial system. Rosales also took the opportunity to suggest that China consider abolishing the death penalty.

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