DAVAO City Mayor Rodrigo Duterte’s boast that he will hang criminals in public if elected president gained the ire of the Catholic Bishop’s Conference of the Philippines on Tuesday, when it said he should reform the judicial system instead.
“You do not deter crime by hanging criminals,” priest Jerome Secillano, executive secretary of the CBCP’s Public Affairs Committee, said in a television interview.
“You deter crime by having efficient and effective law enforcers, uncorrupt judges and lawyers and fearless prison administrators.”
In an interview in his weekly television program on Sunday, Duterte said he would reintroduce capital punishment and hang convicted criminals in public to end criminality and corruption should he be elected President.
“Within three to six months I will stop corruption in the government,” Duterte said.
“I will stop criminality, I will stop drugs in other places. I will recommend to Congress the restoration of the death penalty by hanging in public. I will not hesitate to use the military and the police to stop it.”
Former CBCP president and Lingayen-Dagupan Archbishop Emeritus Oscar Cruz slammed Duterte’s solution to the drug menace and criminality in the country, saying he and his supporters were barbaric and living in the old ages.
“This is very shocking. They [Duterte and his supporters] seem to have been born too late. The time of the barbarians is gone,” Cruz said.
“I don’t agree with Mayor Duterte as far as taking human life so cheaply and lightly as if it was just about getting rid of mosquitoes, getting rid of rats and the like.”
Liberal Party senatorial bet and former Justice Secretary Leila de Lima vowed to fight Duterte, saying he had no right to become the next president.
“If you have no respect for human rights, you also have no respect for the law,” De Lima said.
“How can he lead our country if that is his belief?”