Playing God: The follies of death penalty
As if finding the missing piece in his bloody war on drugs, President Rodrigo Duterte ordered the 18th Congress to pass the bill imposing death penalty for drug convicts. Of the 21 bills he mentioned as priority bills in his 5th SONA, the death penalty bill was among the top five of his priority bills. Although the restoration of death penalty is one of his campaign promises, the timing of his indorsement is rather suspicious as it is made amid the sufferings of many Filipinos due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The war on drugs proffered by the Duterte administration as a solution to criminality has become a masterpiece of persecuting the poor as pawns for a program that is bound to fail. Now, Duterte is trying to pull the last straw by using his minions in the House of Representatives to resurrect a system of retribution that was already consigned to the archives of scorned philosophies of criminal justice. The nonchalance pervading at the halls of the House of Representatives during his 5th SONA when he reiterated his call for the re-imposition of death penalty may be treated as genuine and spontaneous. The subsequent loud applause after he complained of the lack of interest on the issue of death penalty is a cause for grave concern. Will Congress, especially the House of Representatives, behave like blind men hailed to a Utopia of crimelessness?
Pretending as if there are no pressing issues related to the COVID-19 pandemic and the ongoing economic recession that need urgent legislative attention, the House committee on justice recently started debates on the return of the death penalty for certain heinous crimes. The House panel scheduled the hearing for at least 12 death penalty bills filed in the lower chamber less than 2 weeks after President Rodrigo Duterte once again asked lawmakers to reinstate capital punishment via lethal injection for drug-related crimes in his 5th State of the Nation Address on July 27. House Majority Leader Martin Romualdez already promised “thorough” debates on possibly sentencing drug convicts to death – signaling the leadership’s decision to hold these controversial hearings right in the middle of the coronavirus crisis. (rappler.com) Like the ABS-CBN franchise application, we see an overly excited committee to conduct hearings diligently to please the President.
Several studies have shown that there is no solid evidence that death penalty is an effective deterrent to criminality. Index crimes plummeted even without death penalty sometime between 1987 and 1993. There is also a statistical data showing that previous death sentences fell disproportionately on the poor aside from the fact shown by studies that 72% previous death convictions were erroneous. (https://bit.ly/2YesU4D)
When it comes to matters involving life, Congress should not be so engrossed with its legislative powers by playing God over lives judged by human standards as undeserving of grace and mercy. We can never be certain that behind the image of a man cursed to vanish in the death row is a government, a society, or a family that miserably fails in its duty to nurture him in ways we as humans wanted him to be.