The 216 – 54 and one abstention voting that marked the March 7, 2017 approval by the House of Representatives of House Bill 4727 (a measure that seeks to reimpose the death penalty on drug-related crimes) on final reading is, on a personal note, a most welcome development.
Like House Speaker Pantaleon Alvarez, the principal author of HB 4727 and the millions of Filipinos who believe in President Duterte’s campaign against illegal drugs, I agree that reimposing the death penalty on drug-related crimes will be a strong deterrent to the country’s worsening illegal drugs problem, a plague that now affects almost all barangays and all sectors of society.
While the illegal-drugs trade and drug-abuse remain to be among the country’s long-standing social ills, the discovery of the magnitude of the problem by the Duterte administration and the President’s ironclad antidrugs campaign have further divided the nation. There are those who believe that the country’s antidrug-abuse laws must be given more teeth with the reimposition of the death penalty. While there are those who believe that drug suspects and convicts must be given a chance to live and change, and that execution is immoral.
The Church is strongly opposing the restoration of the death penalty, just like the 54 representatives who voted against the passage of House Bill (HB) 4727 at the House of Representatives. And among those who opposed the bill was former President and now Pampanga Rep. and House Deputy Speaker Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo.
Arroyo was just being consistent with her position on death penalty when she signed the law abolishing it in 2006 as the 14th president of the Republic of the Philippines. Like the 53 other representatives who voted against HB 4727, Arroyo has her reason for continuing to oppose the restoration of capital punishment.
The Philippines has a long history of imposing and abolishing the death penalty. During the era of the late President Ferdinand E. Marcos, 35 people were executed for savage crimes marked by “senseless depravity” or “extreme criminal perversity”. When President Corazon C. Aquino took power after the People Power Revolution, the death penalty was abolished, unless for compelling reasons involving heinous crimes, by virtue of the 1987 Constitution. In 1993 the death penalty was reimposed through Republic Act (RA) 7569, or the death-penalty law. Under RA 7569, crimes punishable by death included murder, rape, big-time drug trafficking, kidnapping for ransom, treason, piracy, qualified bribery, parricide, infanticide, plunder, kidnapping and serious illegal detention, robbery with violence or intimidation, qualified vehicle theft and arson.
In 1996 the death-penalty law was amended prescribing death by lethal injection for offenders convicted of heinous crimes. During the presidency of Joseph E. Estrada, seven convicts were put to death through lethal injection. And in 2006, then-President Arroyo signed a law abolishing the death penalty.
This makes Arroyo’s no vote to HB 4727 a highly sensitive choice. Unlike the other representatives who also voted “no” to HB 4727, the former President’s vote to the bill would have local and internatonal implications. A “yes” vote for her on a law she had abolished during her presidency would have placed the former President in an awkward and very embarrassing position.
Arroyo’s signing of the law that abolished death penalty during her presidency echoed not only in the hallowed halls of the Vatican, but in the enclaves of millions of pro-life communities in the world, as well. As President, she could have vetoed the law. But she did not. She stood by her belief about life, and continues to hang on to that same belief today when she voted no to HB 4727. And for that, I salute the former President for standing by her belief, even at the expense of losing a most coveted position at the House.
And for House Speaker Pantaleon D. Alvarez, he must look at the complexity of Arroyo’s vote to HB 4727 and spare her from his plan to remove all those who voted no to HB 4727 from their House committee chairmanships.
As the late Russian military engineer Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoyevsky said about respect, “Above all, don’t lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love.” Definitely, Arroyo did not lie to herself and to the world when she voted no to HB 4727.