Death penalty should remain dead

Our people are united in sympathizing with and helping Mary Jane Veloso, the poor Filipino female domestic worker who was convicted of heroin smuggling in Indonesia. Despite her defense that she was merely duped into carrying the prohibited drug in her suitcase, she was nonetheless sentenced to death in October 2010.

Saved from death. Due to a moratorium on the death penalty at that time, the sentence was not carried out immediately. But newly-elected Indonesian President Joko Widodo lifted the moratorium. So, together with eight others, she was scheduled for execution by firing squad on the evening of April 29 this year.

At the last moment on that very evening, President Widodo—heeding the plea of our President Aquino—granted her a reprieve so she could testify at the trial in the Philippines of her alleged recruiters, Maria Cristina Sergio and Sergio’s live-in partner, Julius Lacanilao. The other eight convicts were however executed, despite the ringing protest of many world leaders.

Veloso’s heart-wrenching story and the feverish effort to save her from the Indonesian firing squad is not yet over (she was merely granted a reprieve), but it reminds me of the grim finality of death as a penalty.

According to Amnesty International, the death penalty has been outlawed in 140 countries for being an inhuman and ineffective deterrent to crime.

Our 1987 Constitution has also barred the imposition of the death penalty “unless for compelling reasons involving heinous crimes, the Congress hereafter provides for it.” Further, the Charter reduced death sentences already imposed to reclusion perpetua (or life imprisonment).

Death penalty revived. Citing the constitutional exception allowing the death penalty for “compelling reasons involving heinous crimes,” Congress enacted Republic Act No. 7659 prescribing death as a penalty for certain crimes it defined as “heinous.”

In People vs Echegaray (June 25, 1996 and Feb. 7, 1997), the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of RA 7659, adjudged the accused Leo Echegaray guilty of raping a 10-year- old girl, and meted out on him the death penalty by lethal injection, the first under RA 7659.

Together with two other justices, I dissented from this and all other judgments imposing the death penalty on the ground that RA 7659 was unconstitutional because Congress failed (1) to show “compelling reasons” to revive it and (2) the crimes for which it was prescribed were not “heinous.”

Apart from these legal grounds, I also strongly felt that the death penalty unfairly targeted the poor, the weak and the underprivileged. Though the many decisions imposing death were per curiam, I have, on many occasions, admitted my dissenting opinions and votes.

Tilted vs the poor. To contribute to the worldwide clamor to abolish the death penalty, and to help Mary Jane (and her family) escape the agony and pain of death by firing squad, may I revisit some of my arguments why the death penalty is tilted against the poor who are exemplified by Mary Jane.

Truly, the death penalty militates against the poor, the powerless and the marginalized. The best example to show the sad plight of the underprivileged is the fact that the counsel for Echegaray (like the one for Mary Jane) was less than competent and enthusiastic in defending him.

The crucial issue of the constitutionality of the death penalty law was not raised in the trial court, not even in the Supreme Court, until Echegaray’s counsel was replaced by the Free Legal Assistance Group, which belatedly brought it up only in the Supplemental Motion for Reconsideration in the high court.

To the poor and unlettered, it is bad enough that the law is complex and written in a strange and incomprehensible language. Worse still, judicial proceedings are themselves complicated, intimidating and damning. The net effect of having a death penalty that is imposed more often than not upon the impecunious is to engender in the minds of the latter—unfounded at times, but unhealthy nevertheless—a sense of the unequal balance of the scales of justice.

Precisely because the underprivileged are what they are, they require and deserve a greater degree of protection and assistance from our Constitution, our laws and our officials, and from the courts, so that in spite of their situation, they can be empowered to rise above themselves and their poverty.

The basic postulates of such a position are, I think, simply that ultimately we all want to better ourselves and that we cannot better ourselves individually to a significant degree if we are unable to advance as an entire people and nation.

All the glory provisions of the Constitution aim to help the poor. Yet, we were faced with this penalty that effectively inflicted the ultimate punishment on none other than the poor and the disadvantaged, a penalty so obviously final and so irreversibly permanent that it erased all hopes of reform, of change for the better.

After a long battle in the courts of law and of public opinion, Congress finally repealed the Death Penalty Law effective June 30, 2006. Had Congress not abolished the death penalty, President Aquino (and the others who labored for Mary Jane) would not have had the moral ascendancy to plead for her life.

This is one more reason why the death penalty should remain dead—in deference to and for the sake of our poor, struggling overseas Filipino workers, many of whom are virtually and unfairly lined up before firing squads in many countries of the world.

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Comments to chiefjusticepanganiban@hotmail.com.