Knee-jerk

Sen. Tito Sotto is seeking the reimposition of a bill that would mete out death as the ultimate penalty for heinous crimes. For him, there is no conflict between his defense of the unborn and his disdain for the lives of convicts. “I am prolife for the unborn and the Filipino family. I am prodeath to heinous criminals,” he says.

It’s the perfect sound bite. Who, after all, would choose the side of murderers and drug traffickers? And Sotto is offering his remedy of capital punishment to a society already “softened” by the recent spate of truly horrendous crimes, from the rape and murder of a six-year-old child to the rampant drug trade that has made observers here and abroad fearful that the Philippines is about to turn into the next narcostate, after Mexico and Colombia.

Indeed, drug traffickers have become so brazen that they no longer operate in remote or seedy places where law enforcers are either absent or in cahoots with the elements they’re meant to police. Drug traffickers are now favoring plush enclaves like Bonifacio High Street and Makati for their operations, setting up their drug laboratories in upscale condominium buildings where the middle and upper classes have traditionally felt secure and removed from the more depraved conditions of their metropolis.

To this development, Sotto proposes a simple solution: the physical elimination of convicts, “not to deter, but to prevent them from doing it again, and also [to instill fear in criminals].” He cites the case of Chinese drug lord Lim Seng who, during martial law, died by firing squad on orders of the dictator Ferdinand Marcos. “The record will speak for itself… It took almost 10 years before drug trafficking started again in the Philippines,” says Sotto.

Assuming the assertion is true, that Lim Seng’s execution did deter drug trafficking for a while, was that because of the severity of the punishment, or the fact that the drug lord was in fact caught and sentenced? And not through the ordinary course of justice, remember, but the work of Marcos’ dreaded military and intelligence apparatus, whose ruthlessness and lethal efficiency the strongman was only too eager to demonstrate to his perceived enemies. The deterrence, in short, might have had nothing to do with the death penalty itself, but with the fact that the country was in the grip of a brutal dictatorship that could do what it wanted with anyone who crossed it, whether criminal, political opponent, activist, or ordinary citizen.

The death penalty was in place throughout Marcos’ rule, but was abolished by Corazon Aquino in 1986.

Fidel Ramos revived it in 1993, only for Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo to suspend it again in 2006. It should be asked then: In the 13 years that it was legal to put a convicted criminal to death, how much—by what percent—did it actually deter crime? Leo Echegaray, convicted of child rape, hogged newspaper headlines for weeks early in 1999 as the first to receive the death penalty since its 1993 reimposition. Was there an appreciable diminution in criminality after his execution? Did thievery and plunder in public offices—and those are heinous crimes, no less outrageous than rape or murder—decline with the public spectacle of a common criminal put to death by the state?

If ordinary Filipinos today can recall that period from 1993 to 2006 as a halcyon time unmarred by breaches of the peace, with criminality on the streets and in the government suddenly scarce because the populace was all too aware of the noose dangling over the heads of anyone who broke the law—then perhaps the death penalty should be brought back. Provided, of course, that the public executions begin with lawmakers convicted of plundering the people’s money. Why should only poor saps like Echegaray take the deadly rap, after all? If the death penalty is to be reinstituted, let it cover mighty and meek alike.

But that, in a nutshell, is why Sotto’s proposal is just the kind of knee-jerk, ill-thought-out proposal that shouldn’t be taken seriously. When the justice system remains skewed for the moneyed, the death penalty will only be another instrument of social injustice. If the government wants to deter crime, it has to do its job properly: Apprehend suspects with dispatch, pursue airtight cases, clap the convicts in jail for life. Make crime pay—not with death, but by the cold certainty of punishment.