Death is coming

Philippine president-elect Rodrigo Duterte announced on Monday he will push legislation through Congress to re-impose the death penalty as soon as possible. “I need it to combat crime and to deter it,” Duterte said. He added that sentences should be carried out with the rope. “What I will do is urge Congress to restore death penalty by hanging.”

Duterte has vowed to solve the crime problem “in three to six months”.

However if a new law does pass quickly, it would take perhaps six months before the first death sentence was delivered. So to meet his self-imposed deadline, Duterte must rely on other methods.

He has not been shy about revealing details of these other methods. They too involve “killing criminals”. 

 “If you resist, show violent resistance, my order to police [is] to shoot to kill. Shoot to kill for organised crime. You heard that? Shoot to kill for every organised crime,” declared Duterte on Monday. He also said he would arm district officials.

As such we can expect a spike in state violence as soon as Duterte takes his oath, on June 30, as the first president from Mindanao. 

Why the campaign for capital punishment then? In part, it may be because Duterte is a lawyer who seeks to ground his most outrageous pronouncements in legal provisions, and because it will serve his long-term plan, to reshape the political order in his image as an unquestioned source of discipline and punishment.

Will he find enough members of both chambers of Congress to vote for the new law?

The capital punishment measure will have to meet the constitution’s strict requirements, that any imposition must be for “compelling reasons involving heinous crimes”. 

It is likely that the new president will have popular backing for the death penalty. The 38 per cent of the electorate who chose him as the country’s next president must have known that Duterte wanted the return of capital punishment – and voted for it. This fact may be enough to force a substantial number of lawmakers to vote for the new measure. But the Duterte campaign’s subtle and savvy use of social media will likely drive more supporters, and more lawmakers, into the fold.

Nevertheless, they will be wrong. The problem with the death penalty is that there is no provision for error; if an innocent person is killed, there is no reprieve from the grave if innocence is belatedly proven. And our experience in the Philippines is eerily similar to that of other countries: More often than not, those who are poor and cannot afford adequate legal services end up on death row. The problem with the death penalty, then, is that there is no provision for systemic error. Above all, academic research has repeatedly shown that the death penalty is not an effective deterrent. It creates the illusion of a solution while in fact solving nothing.

Filipinos are desperate for relief from lawlessness. Bringing back the death penalty would only add to their pain.