The broad coalition of anti-death penalty advocates will sustain the campaign against the proposed reimposition of capital punishment until the archaic proposal is finally consigned to the legislative dustbin.

The widening coalition of legislators, religious ministers both from the Catholic Church and other religious denominations, civil society and non-governmental organization networks, college students and youth opposing the revival of the death penalty has vowed to intensify its campaign inside and outside of Congress.

Unifying the coalition are the following cogent and focal grounds against the reinstallation of the death penalty:

1. It is not a solution to criminality and the drug menace. The prevention of heinous crimes involves a complex and multidimensional process relative to problems ranging from poverty and inequity to police corruption and brutality, inept and discriminatory prosecution and flawed judicial system. All of these negative factors contribute to the fallibility of human justice which ensnare to the gallows even the innocent. Consequently, punishment alone is not the solution to crimes.

2. The only argument of the proponents for the revival of capital punishment is that the death penalty is a deterrent to the commission of alleged heinous crimes. Empirical studies both here and abroad document that the death penalty is not an effective deterrent to the commission of crimes. Even logic tells us that despite the fact that since the dawn of civilization the death penalty has been imposed on various offenses involving varied modes of execution, until now heinous crimes across the world are being committed mocking the extreme severity of penalty.

3. The death penalty desecrates the right to life which is sacrosanct and inviolable, and is an affront to human dignity.

4. The death penalty exacerbates the culture of violence and death, and its revival adds the State-sanctioned killings to the unabated extrajudicial killings.

5. The death penalty further marginalizes and victimizes the poor who can neither retain competent counsel nor influence court processes.

6. Capital punishment enforces punitive and retributive justice, instead of promoting the modern concept of penology on restorative justice which reforms the convict and prepares his reintegration into society.

7. The reimposition of the death penalty is a violation of the country’s commitment to abolish capital punishment and not to reimpose it pursuant to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and the Second Optional Protocol on the ICCPR of which the Philippines is a ratifying state party.

EDCEL C. LAGMAN