Incoming House Speaker urges Congress to restore death penalty

A lethal injection room. (Wikipedia Photo)

MANILA—In response to President Rodrigo R. Duterte’s call for the restoration of the death penalty, Davao del Norte Rep. and incoming House Speaker Pantaleon Alvarez has filed a bill urging Congress for the expeditious passage of a law reimposing capital punishment on certain heinous crimes.

Alvarez’ death penalty bill was the first measure filed in the House of Representatives of the 17th Congress and was jointly filed with Capiz Rep. Fredenil Castro.

In filing House Bill No. 1, Alvarez and Castro noted that the “criminal justice system has had to make do with penal laws that are perceived to be less than dissuasive.”

“Our criminal justice system has been emasculated in no small measure by the non-deterrent nature of impossible penalties on the most depraved violations of human life, honor and dignity,” they said.

Alvarez and Castro said that “there is evidently a need to reinvigorate the war against criminality by revising a deterrent coupled by its consistent, persistent and determined implementation.

“This need is as compelling and critical as any. The basic tenets of equity and justice demand that our penal system be one not only of reformation but corresponding retribution,” they stressed.

Once enacted into law, the crimes of human trafficking, illegal recruitment, plunder, treason, parricide, infanticide, rape, qualified piracy and bribery, kidnapping and illegal detention, robbery with violence against or intimidation of persons, car theft, destructive arson, terrorism and drug-related cases, among others, would be punishable by death.

But while President Duterte has voiced his preference for death by hanging, the measure filed by Alvarez and Castro calls for lethal injection, the mode of execution when capital punishment was restored under former President Fidel V. Ramos until it was abolished in 2006.