Senator Emmanuel Pacquiao is helping push for the Senate approval to reimpose the death penalty, suspended since 2006, before the end of 2018.
“We will rush its approval in the chamber this year,” the born-again Pacquiao said in Tagalog in an interview with dwIZ.
Pacquiao made the remarks after the Catholic Church’s update on its catechism declaring the death penalty as “inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person.”
Pacquiao, who leads discussions on the death penalty at the Senate justice committee, maintained that capital punishment was acceptable, being in the Bible, according to him.
Capital punishment in this largely Catholic nation of 106 million people has a varied history and was legal after independence and increased in use under President Ferdinand Marcos from 1965 to 1986.
After the fall of Marcos, there was a moratorium on capital punishment from 1987 to 1999, followed by a resumption in executions from 1999 to 2006, and followed—in turn—by a law ending the practice.
Asked what heinous crimes should be meted with the death penalty, Pacquiao said drug trafficking, rape with murder, kidnap-for-ransom, and robbery with murder.
But he clarified he was open to limiting capital punishment to drug-related offenses to get the support of other senators.
Filipinos have mixed opinions about the death penalty, with many opposing it on religious and humanitarian grounds, while advocates see it as a way of deterring crimes.
President Fidel Ramos promised during his campaign for the presidency in 1992 that he would support the re-introduction of the death penalty in response to increasing crime rates.
The new law, which restored capital punishment, provided the use of the electric chair until the gas chamber (chosen by the government to replace electrocution) could be used.
Executions resumed in 1999, starting with Leo Echegaray, who was put to death by lethal injection under Ramos’ successor Joseph Estrada, marking the first execution after the reinstatement of the death penalty.
The next execution saw an embarrassing mishap when President Joseph Estrada decided to grant a last-minute reprieve, but failed to get through to the prison authorities in time to stop the execution.
Following on a personal appeal by his spiritual advisor, Bishop Teodoro Bacani, Estrada called a moratorium in 2000 to honor the bimillennial anniversary of Christ’s birth. Executions were resumed a year later.
Estrada’s successor, Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, was a vocal opponent of the death penalty and also approved a moratorium, but later permitted executions and denied pardons.
On April 15, 2006, the sentences of 1,230 death row inmates were commuted to life imprisonment in what the London-based Amnesty International described as the “largest ever commutation of death sentence.”