Hey Senator, the 70′s called — They want their sense of social justice and their porn ‘stache back.
On the back of a groundswell of public annoyance with the increase in violent crimes – no doubt fueled by sensational and, to be fair, extremely disturbing recent stories like the New Year’s Eve shooting in Caloocan, the rape and murder of a six-year-old by a drug-addled pedicab driver in Manila, and months of breathtaking revelations of the out-of-control plunder being carried out by the Aquino regime – Senator Vicente “Tito” Sotto III earlier this week fulfilled his occupying three-dimensional space role by filing Senate Bill 2080, which seeks to re-impose the death penalty in the Philippines by repealing Republic Act 9346. In his explanatory note prefacing the bill, Sotto (whose grammar hints at why he felt it necessary to copy and paste from better writers for some of his past speeches) asserts,
“The influx of heinous crimes committed poses an alarming situation in the country nowadays. The indiscriminate and horrendous brutality happening everywhere rightfully and justifiably compels the government to resort to the ultimate criminal penalty provided for by no less than our constitution — the death penalty. The imposition of life imprisonment proves to be a non-deterrent against criminality.”
Sotto’s claim that the Constitution “provides for” the death penalty is a bit of a stretch. What the Constitution actually says on the topic (in Article III, Sec. 19) is, “Neither shall the death penalty be imposed, unless, for compelling reasons involving heinous crimes, the Congress hereafter provides for it.” Making the vague implication that the Constitution requires the death penalty, though, is actually pretty sophisticated for a guy whose actual vocational skills include sitting still for makeup and reciting a provided script in a mildly amusing way. What the Constitution allows is for Congress to provide for a death penalty for “compelling reasons” –which “an alarming situation in the country nowadays” certainly is not.
Despite Sotto’s network handlers’ making a feeble attempt to provide a little PR support for their boy through a hastily-contrived Twitter poll –
– and similar sentiments from that other titan of sophistication, Manila Mayor Joseph Estrada, it seems no one in Congress has any interest in considering a revival of the death penalty, if for no other reason than they do not share Sotto’s superhuman immunity to vicious, multi-directional criticism. Both the Legislature and the Administration have demurred on the question, the Catholic hierarchy has expressed surprise and regret that their anti-RH Bill champion would take a position to which they must be categorically opposed, and most of the media (including my own paper) has likewise rejected the idea.
Most of the arguments against the death penalty are based on morality: It is wrong to kill to redress a crime, and/or there is too great a risk that an innocent person may be put to death. Moral arguments are difficult, because they’re subjective; I happen to agree with those, but I would not try to convince someone else that the death penalty should be eliminated from public discourse based on them, because they are beliefs.
There are, however, more practical arguments against the death penalty that even unimaginative minds like Tito Sotto’s should be able to grasp. Last week I attended a luncheon hosted by Vice President Binay. His first remarks to our group once everyone was seated were not “good afternoon,” or “thank you for coming,” but, “I’d like to give you all an update on the case of Joselito Zapanta.” Zapanta, of course, is an OFW on Saudi Arabia’s death row for killing his landlord; Binay, who is the current designated government overseer for OFW affairs, has been busy trying to negotiate and collect the appropriate amount of “blood money” to pay the victim’s family and secure an affidavit of forgiveness that would at least spare Zapanta from execution.
Binay is cautiously optimistic the effort will be successful; it may be, or it may not. It almost certainly would not be if the same crime Zapanta was judged guilty of in Saudi Arabia was punishable by death here as well. The same double standard would also apply to most of the Filipinos currently under death sentences in execution-happy China, if (as some have suggested) the death penalty in the Philippines was applied to drug trafficking crimes.
The only thing that Sotto got right – and it is a safe assumption that it was purely coincidental that he did – is that the current state of affairs in the Philippines does not present much of a deterrent to crime of any sort. But Sotto would be hard-pressed to find actual evidence that even suggests the death penalty might be that deterrent. While death-penalty advocates stubbornly insist the ultimate punishment is necessary to curb violent crime rates, there is a different conclusion – one which at least has a correlation with actual statistics – that the death penalty has no effect at all, and might actually be related to higher crime rates: Among the top 10 US states with the highest murder rates (in 2012), only one, Michigan, does not have a death penalty; in the top 20 states, 17 are death-penalty states. Michigan ranks as high as it does (fourth, behind Mississippi, Louisiana, and Alabama) because it is home to the two most murderous cities in the US, Flint and Detroit; not coincidentally, both cities have a poverty rate well over 30%.
Regionally, the statistics are even more telling: The Southern states, which since the reinstatement of the death penalty in 1976 have executed nearly seven times as many people as the next-highest region (1,115, compared to 162 for the Midwestern region, 84 in the West, and just 4 in the Northeast), over the past 12 years have had an average annual murder rate of 6.39 per 100,000 people. In the same period, the Northeast, which is home to huge and definitely not violence-free cities like New York, Boston, Washington, Philadelphia, and Baltimore but still rarely imposes the death penalty, had an average murder rate of 4.13 per 100,000 people.
In this country, what encourages criminality is a combination of poverty – which has numerically gotten worse during the Aquino Administration – and an extremely dysfunctional legal system. It’s not the lack of harsh enough penalties that serves as an “anti-deterrent” – no one in his or her right mind would consider spending time in the shithole that is a typical Philippine penal facility anything like an acceptable risk – it’s the very high probability that a criminal act will not be prevented or even seriously challenged, and that the perpetrator will never be caught. The Philippine justice system (with apologies to the exceptional few like Fiscal Canete, whose dedication and work is rather beginning to resemble that of the hopelessly-outnumbered police in the first Mad Max film) is from bottom to top irredeemably inefficient and hopelessly inequitable.
The recent titillating scandal involving Vhong “Why did I give myself a Vietnamese-sounding nickname?” Navarro and some thug’s furniture, as loathe as I am to give it any attention at all, is a perfect example of what is wrong with the Philippines. It should be a rather straightforward matter for the police, prosecutor’s office, and court in Taguig to sort out according to long-established procedures that are already spelled out in painstaking detail. And yet the entire criminal justice system is behaving as though the case is not only a national security matter requiring the direct involvement of Justice Department, National Bureau of Investigation, and the Secretary of the Interior (who may as well be another tit on the boar alongside Tito Sotto, for all the value his presence brings to any situation), but the first time anyone has had to deal with an assault case.
Tito Sotto – who is more annoying than most, but is certainly not unique among Filipino “lawmakers” – can’t think far enough below the surface to propose something that substantially addresses the real causes of “rising criminality”, and so he applies a time-wasting and socially-unacceptable canard like “reinstate the death penalty” as canned frosting on a turd, and figures he’s actually working. And why not; for doing that, someone pointed a microphone and a camera at him, and that’s been his yardstick for success most of his adult life. Do that on the Internet, they call you a troll. Do that in a nice shirt in Pasay, they call you a Senator.
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