A MEMBER of the minority bloc in the House of Representatives on Tuesday vowed to block all attempts in Congress to pass the bill reviving the death penalty.
Buhay party-list Rep. Lito Atienza, a pro-life and human rights advocate, said he would challenge Speaker Pantaleon Alvarez’s plan to have the bill bringing back the death penalty passed before the Christmas recess in December.
Alvarez himself authored House Bill 1 that seeks to reimpose the death penalty for heinous crimes.
“The Speaker has thrown down the gauntlet on the death penalty. We will put up a fight,” Atienza said.
“The death penalty is the absolute and irreparable deprivation of human rights. It flouts the natural and unassailable right to life.
“Congress cannot repeal the right to life of every human being”•of every Filipino.”
Atienza was responding to Alvarez’s plan to approve on third and final reading the return of the death sentence before Congress adjourns for the holidays.
“As far as the House is concerned, we will approve it [the reinstatement of the death penalty] before the Christmas break,” Alvarez said.
He said the House would leave it up to the Department of Justice to specify the mode of putting convicts to death.
“If they want to hang them, shoot them by firing squad, it’s up to them. The criminals would be dead either way,” he said.
But Atienza said “There’s no point in performing another experiment on the death penalty that is bound to fail at the horrible sacrifice of more human lives.”
Atienza said the country already experimented on the death penalty in the past and it failed to deter crime.
“The certainty of capture and punishment of criminals, regardless of the severity of the penalty itself, is the best deterrence to other would-be offenders,” Atienza said.
He also denounced the death penalty as “infected with economic prejudice and human error.”
“It is bad enough that we already have a virtual death penalty in place with the unabated summary executions of alleged suspects sans the benefit of a full and fair trial,” he said.
Congress abolished the death penalty in 2006 as a result of flaws, including the belated discovery of the wrongful execution of Leo Echegaray.