Philippine Daily Inquirer First Posted 00:57:00 05/24/2008
MANILA, Philippines—As a result of the grisly bank massacre in Cabuyao, Laguna last week, there have arisen from Congress calls for restoration of the death penalty. The calls would have been understandable if they had come from non-congressional quarters, such as anti-crime citizens’ groups. But they come from the very same legislature that abolished it. Which seems to reveal that our lawmakers have the intellectual depth of a pond, which ripples at the slightest feel of a pebble or an insect. How sad that our lawmaking and policy planning have ended up in the hands of men and women so prone to hysteria, myopia and amnesia.
The legislators calling for restoration say they have been consistently against abolition. But didn’t Sen. Panfilo Lacson vote for the measure in 2006? Even Sen. Juan Miguel Zubiri, who was a member of the House of Representatives then, was and remains a member of the administration coalition that delivered the torrential votes that enabled the death penalty law’s passage.
The abolition was passed in June 2006 after lawmakers crossed party lines, not because of political conviction and political will but because of political accommodation—they wanted to please President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, who was bound for the Vatican then and was eager to present the abolition law as a gift to Pope Benedict XVI. This only goes to show that, in this corner of the world, legislation and policy planning involving issues as far-reaching as justice and law and order are subject willy-nilly to political passions and horse-trading. This is a sad reflection of the quality not only of our legislation but also of our public policy planning, formulation and management as a whole.
Should restoration win, it would be the second time that the nation would be reversing itself. In 1993, Congress and the administration of President Fidel Ramos passed a law reinstituting the death penalty, which had been abolished by the 1986 Constitutional Commission. At least that time, it took seven years for government leaders to change their minds. Now, barely two years after abolishing capital punishment, they are thinking of re-introducing it. It looks like the nation’s policy planning is becoming more and more driven by indecision and wooly thinking.
If it is some relief, some elder statesmen, (like Sen. Aquilino Pimentel) and the newly appointed chair of the Commission on Human Rights, Leila de Lima, have cautioned legislators against re-imposing the death penalty. Pimentel has urged his co-senators to check their “knee-jerk reactions,” and De Lima has opposed the call altogether, arguing that there’s no evidence to show that capital punishment is a deterrent to very grave crimes.
Pimentel’s admonition is very acute. In calling for lethal injection against persons convicted of heinous crimes, Lacson and Zubiri seem to have abandoned measured response and calm thinking for fit and frenzy. They could have made firm calls for full-scale inquiry by the police or the National Bureau of Investigation into the massacre, or they could have asked for a review of public safety and civil defense measures against robberies. Instead, they called for the abolition of the death penalty. This betrays as much their lack of understanding of the substantive arguments against capital punishment, as well as their incapacity for forward-looking and in-depth public policy planning and management.
Capital punishment is inhuman, barbaric and unchristian. More and more nations, especially those that have achieved a certain measure of progress and enlightenment, are abandoning it. The Catechism of the Catholic Church states that more and more compelling reasons for its abolition have arisen, and that the goal of justice should be rehabilitative, not punitive.
Perhaps the most important, capital punishment as a deterrent to crimes is a fiction. What deters crime is not the severity but the certainty of punishment, which comes out of effective law enforcement and firm and determined administration of justice. Some of our lawmakers seem to have forgotten this. As a result, there’s a distinct possibility that the death penalty will be restored once more and the nation will slide back to the barbarity of the Dark Ages.
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