Who we are

Pinoy Kasi : Who we are

First posted 00:19am (Mla time) April 19, 2006
By Michael L. Tan
Inquirer

Editor's Note: Published on Page A15 of the April 19, 2006 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer

IT ISN'T just in the Philippines where the debate over the death penalty has been revived. Last week, for instance, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops issued an Easter pastoral letter calling for the abolition of the death penalty.

The United States and Japan are currently the only developed countries where capital punishment is still used. The United States is often singled out for studies because, like the Philippines, it abolished the death penalty in 1972, only to bring it back in 1976.

Not all the American states have brought back capital punishment, and debates continue with many issues. I'm summarizing some of the issues here:

The first is that of fairness. Opponents of the death penalty have pointed out that there is a certain arbitrariness to the use of capital punishment. In the United States, about 2 percent of convicted murderers are sentenced to death. Turning the tables around, one could argue that if the death penalty were truly a form of just punishment, then all convicted murderers should be executed.

That will never happen of course, and, worse, the chances of being meted out the death penalty, and of the sentence being carried out, increase if one is poor, and an African-American or Hispanic-American.

I am certain that if we looked at our own Death Row, we would find that most of the convicts are from the lower socioeconomic strata, and if we look at the ones who have been executed, the percentage of the poor would rise even higher.

Another way of discussing this fairness issue is to look at how we protest whenever a Filipino is sentenced to death abroad. Yet, using the argument of fairness, we really cannot argue against the execution of Filipinos overseas if we continue to impose the death penalty here at home.

A second issue is that of justice, which is different from fairness. Here, the issue is whether capital punishment sometimes results in the execution of the innocent. With advances in forensics and DNA analysis, more and more cases of wrongful conviction have been uncovered in the United States.

This issue often overlaps with that of fairness in the sense that wrongful convictions are more likely to involve the poor and non-whites.

The possibility of wrongful convictions is high in the Philippines. Between 1997 and 2003, the Supreme Court reviewed about 730 death sentences, and in almost 500 cases, the sentences were reduced or remanded. Sixty of those who had been sentenced to death were actually acquitted. If DNA tests were made available, I suspect many more cases would have been overturned.

A third issue is that of deterrence. Death penalty advocates say that executions bring down the crime rate. The US data show otherwise. In the northeastern states, where the death penalty is almost never used, murder rates are about 4.2 per 100,000 population. In the south, which accounts for 80 percent of executions, the murder rate is 6.6 per 100,000, the highest in the country.

In the Philippines, the role of the death penalty in deterring crime is probably even more insignificant, mainly because the biggest criminals know they are untouchable. As small-time drug pushers and kidnapping hirelings languish in prisons, waiting for the lethal injection, the syndicate heads, the politicians who plunder the economy, go scot-free. Criminals know that crime pays in the Philippines, with or without the death penalty.

Terrorism

The American debate over the death penalty found new focus recently with the case of Zacarias Moussaoui, a French national of Moroccan descent who was convicted for terrorism in connection with the terrorist attacks in Washington, D.C. and New York City on Sept. 11, 2001. The jury is still undecided whether to recommend the death penalty or life imprisonment.

Moussaoui was actually arrested in August 2001, a month before the terrorist attacks. Immigration agents apprehended him after he tried to get a flight school to teach him how to fly a commercial airliner. He was convicted on the argument that he had refused, after his arrest, to divulge information about his terrorist connections. If he had done so, the prosecution argued, maybe the twin towers bombing could have been prevented.

Public opinion seems to favor the conviction, and probably even a death sentence, because the 9/11 attacks were so heinous. It didn't help that Moussaoui showed no remorse during the trial. He described as "gorgeous" the smoking ruins of the World Trade Center, and said the attackers were now probably "in the highest level of paradise."

The defense has argued that Moussaoui is mentally unstable, probably a schizophrenic. He is the son of a violent alcoholic father and a mother who left him and his siblings with others for childcare. Al-Qaeda members themselves said Moussaoui was considered too unreliable and was being reserved for a second wave of attacks.

John Farmer, senior counsel to a special commission created to investigate the 9/11 attacks, has argued that Moussaoui should not be executed since he was not a leader of al-Qaeda, and did not actually participate in the terrorist attacks. Another angle he uses is that executing Moussaoui would be a form of assisted suicide, one that would allow him to claim martyrdom.

Evil

The Moussaoui case should make us think hard about the death penalty in the Philippines. A death sentence, an execution, could bring some sense of justice to several thousands in the Moussaoui case. For society, the execution becomes part of a morality play, where the state can claim that it is meting out justice -- with hopes that this will deter crime.

Death-penalty advocates refer to the need to deal with evil, but John Farmer offers another perspective when he writes: "Zacarias Moussaoui is evil, and there is no doubt that he arrived here determined to kill Americans, but he was not a leader of al-Qaeda." Moreover, Farmer argues for life imprisonment so that Moussaoui can die in prison "frustrated and forgotten, embittered and anonymous."

Farmer makes a good point about the kind of justice Moussaoui deserves. When we lash out at those who have wronged us, we justify our actions by saying we are dealing with evil. That argument is being used by the US government itself, when American soldiers torture and degrade suspected Islamist militants. But an American legislator looking into alleged brutality against the suspected Islamists summarized the issues well when he said that human rights, even for those we perceive to be evil, have to be respected: "It's not about who they are, but about who we are."

US Catholic bishops put it another way: "The use of state-authorized killing in our names diminishes us all." In the name of restoring justice, we all lose part of our humanity whenever we condone an execution, whether in the lethal injection chamber or through salvaging or extra-legal means.