No for the death penalty I

AM against the re-imposition of the death penalty because I have been against capital punishment from the beginning. I have known in my younger years of many cases of death being imposed as a punishment and realized that, if the justice system is faulty, imposing the death penalty is as wrong as summarily executing suspected criminals. I have known of people who were wrongly accused and killed.

After the House justice committee voted in favor of House Bill 1 that seeks to reimpose the death penalty, the bill goes to the House plenary for second reading, which is the time when a measure is debated on. House members are divided on the issue, based on media interviews of some of them.

I only knew him as “James.” A frail framed youth with an easy smile, he was always present in the many protest actions in the late seventies. I got to know him in my early participation in the struggle against the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos. One scene that was etched in my mind was the rally whose assembly area was the Redemptorist Church grounds. He was eating Sky Flakes biscuits for lunch.

“James” was always inconspicuous, the reason why he could be easily forgotten. I lost track of him when my participation in the struggle deepened and the many challenges came our way. I think it was in 1988, when talks about the errors in the conduct of the purge by the Left of so-called deep penetration agents, that somebody reminded me of “James.” He was supposedly one of those executed in the purge in Mindanao.

It was then that I began to worry about the Left's underdeveloped justice system. I recalled my readings about the history of the struggle in other countries, like the purges by the Chinese Communist Party during its Cultural Revolution and the later inner party struggle that resulted in the execution of the “Gang of Four” that included the late Mao Zedong's wife Jiang Qing. And, of course, there was Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge's “killing fields” in Cambodia.

That time, I told myself that the bourgeois setup, wherein a suspect is accorded due process and allowed to be represented by a legal counsel in a hearing that has a bias for pieces of evidence and testimony of witnesses, was definitely better. It at least professes to give protection to the rights of the accused.

Of course, it has its faults, like its being biased in favor of the rich and its conviction of innocents, mostly the poor, the reason why I oppose the re-imposition of the death penalty. But the setup was better than the one we had that time.