Eight pro-death penalty senators on Wednesday pushed for the revival of capital punishment in the wake of the Dec. 20 killing of two unarmed civilians by a police officer in Paniqui, Tarlac.
There are 10 pending death penalty bills in the Senate that have all been referred to the committee on justice.
The proposed measures were filed by eight of the 24 members of the Senate: Senators Ronald dela Rosa, Manny Pacquiao, Bong Revilla, Panfilo Lacson, Christopher Go, Sherwin Gatchalian, Imee Marcos, and Senate President Vicente Sotto III.
However, the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines (CBCP) on Wednesday said the death penalty will not solve the spate of killings in the country.
“I appeal to lawmakers that killings won’t stop killings,” Manila Apostolic Administrator Bishop Broderick Pabillo said in an interview on Radyo Veritas.
Pabillo said the country’s flawed justice system should not be allowed to hand down death sentences, and urged policemen not to tolerate injustices committed by their own colleagues.
Dela Rosa said the cold-blooded murders of Sonya Gregorio, 55, and her 25-year-old son Frank Anthony Gregorio at the hands of Police Senior Master Sgt. Jonel Nuezca might never have happened if a law reviving the death penalty had been passed.
“That rogue cop deserves the death penalty,” Dela Rosa said, referring to Nuezca.
“Who would want to kill a person if he knows he will also be killed via the death penalty?” he asked.
Dela Rosa, an ally of President Rodrigo Duterte, lamented that his bill was having a hard time moving forward in Congress.
Pacquiao said he hopes the death penalty can be given another chance to hasten the delivery of justice to victims of heinous crimes.
Lacson, a former PNP chief, said police should “show no mercy” to Nuezca.
“If what’s on video tells the whole story, I enjoin the PNP leadership to show no mercy,” Lacson said.
“They should spare no effort to make sure that he rots in jail. He’s the last policeman that they need in the force,” he said.
Lacson has filed a bill which seeks to re-institute the death penalty amid the “alarming surge of heinous crimes in recent years.”
Under the proposed measure, several crimes would be punishable by death such as treason, qualified piracy, qualified bribery, parricide, murder, infanticide, rape, kidnapping and illegal detention, robbery with violence and intimidation of persons, destructive arson, and human trafficking.
Sotto conceded that senators are unlikely to pass a measure to revive the death penalty, but said he believes that if capital punishment is applied only to high-level drug trafficking, it might have a better chance of being passed.
Senator Richard Gordon, chair of the Senate justice committee, has expressed his reluctance to begin the deliberations on the death penalty bills even as it was one of the priority measures outlined by Duterte in his State of the Nation Address.
Senate Majority Leader Juan Miguel Zubiri also maintained his opposition to the reimposition of the death penalty.
In the House of Representatives, Reps. Robert Ace Barbers of Surigao del Norte, Michael Defensor of Anakalusugan, and Bienvenido Abante, Jr. of Manila said the death penalty would deter people from committing heinous crimes.
“I am for death penalty… I believe this is the only penalty that would bring shivers to the bones of the evil doers,” Barbers, one of the principal authors of a death penalty bill, said.
“[This is] the only deterrent to the commission of heinous crimes, the only thing that even the most hardened criminals fear,” added Barbers, chairman of the House committee on dangerous drugs.
Defensor agreed. “I”ve always supported death penalty for heinous crimes such as what has transpired in Tarlac, the rape of children and the massacre of hapless victims, among others,” he said.
Assistant Minority Leader and ACT Teachers Rep. France Castro, on the other hand, opposed the reimposition of the death penalty, saying only the poor and powerless would suffer.
In a statement, the youth group Kabataan party list said the reimostion of the death penalty would not give justice to Sonya and Frank Gregorio or to thousands of victims of “police brutality and terrorism.”
Capital punishment was abolished in 2006 under the presidency of former speaker Gloria Macapagal Arroyo.
Interior Secretary Eduardo Año on Wednesday labeled Nuezca a “cold-blooded murderer” and a “disgrace to the police profession.”
In a news release, Año assured the public that Nuezca would face the full force of the law for the double murder of a mother and son over an altercation in Paniqui, Tarlac last Sunday.
The shooting incident, recorded on a mobile phone, has been widely circulated on social media.
“Justice will be served to the family of victims Sonya and son Frank Anthony Gregorio. We will not let this gruesome killing pass. He will rot in jail,” he said in Filipino.
“He tainted the good image of the police that we have worked hard to improve for a long time. He is one of the rotten eggs in the ranks of the police whom we have to get rid of and teach a lesson.”
Año updated President Rodrigo Duterte on the criminal case against Nuezca, who has been subjected to an inquest by the Tarlac provincial prosecutor for two counts of murder.
The accused, he said, has smeared the memory of 229 police officers who were killed in action while fighting crime, drug syndicates, and communist-terrorists since 2016, apart from 812 others who have been wounded in police operations.
Both the Department of the Interior and Local Government (DILG) and the PNP would never tolerate wrongdoing in the police service, Año said, appealing to the public not to condemn the entire police organization for Nuezca’s crimes.
A total of 16,839 police officers have been penalized since 2016 under the PNP’s internal cleansing program to rid its ranks of scalawags.
Data showed that 4,784 police personnel have been dismissed from the service, 8,349 have been suspended, and 1,803 have been reprimanded.
Other punishments included demotion, forfeiture of salary, restriction, and withholding of privileges have also been imposed.
Some 564 PNP personnel have also been removed for involvement in illegal drugs.
In a public address, Duterte condemned the senseless killings, warning other police officers against abuse.
“Your actions must be in accordance with the law. You do not follow the law. If you salvage or kill, then I’m sorry, that is not part of the agreement of how we should do our work,” he said.