May 07, 2019

BSED-FILIPINO Ethics
Death Penalty Should Not Be Legalize in the Philippines
Death penalty is a government-sanctioned practice whereby a person is killed by the state
as a punishment for a crime. The sentence that someone be punished in such a manner is referred
to as a death sentence, whereas the act of carrying out the sentence is known as an execution.
Crimes that are punishable by death are known as capital crimes or capital offences, and they
commonly include offences such as murder, mass murder, terrorism, treason, espionage, offenses
against the State, such as attempting to overthrow government, piracy, drug trafficking, war
crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide, but may include a wide range of offences
depending on a country. Death penalty is one of the first forms of punishments in the world. The
first ever established death penalty law date as far as Eighteenth Century BCE in the Code of
King Hammurabi of Babylon which designates the consequence of 25 different crimes as death.
During the Athenian Age, death is considered as the only punishment for crimes. This has been
their way of minimizing the crime rate in their own respective places. In the Philippines, the
earliest record of death penalty was during the Spanish Era. The Spanish colonizers brought with
them Medieval Europe’s penal system including executions. The earliest forms of death penalty included
burning, decapitation, drowning, flaying, garrotte, hanging, shooting, stabbing and others. Some
of our heroes, including our national hero, Jose Rizal, have been victims of death penalty. During
the American Period, death penalty is still widely used. Public executions are still held though
some laws have been passed to minimize the field of death penalty. Some of the capital crimes
punishable by death were Treason, parricide, piracy, kidnapping, murder, rape, and robbery with
homicide. Death penalty was primarily used against the Nationalist Filipinos who build
resistance against the American Colonizers. During the Japanese Occupation, no record of death
penalties was made simply because extrajudicial executions were widely practiced as part of the
pacification of the country.
There are many organizations which oppose the idea of Death Penalty. One of the
organizations is the Amnesty International; Amnesty International is a global movement of more
than 7 million people who take injustice personally. We are campaigning for a world where
human rights are enjoyed by all. There are reasons stated why the said organization doesn’t want
to legalize or want to abolish the death penalty in every country in the world, the reasons are the
following, it is irreversible and mistakes happen, execution is the ultimate, irrevocable
punishment: the risk of executing an innocent person can never be eliminated. Since 1973, for
example, more than 160 prisoners sent to death row in the USA have later been exonerated or
released from death row on grounds of innocence. Others have been executed despite serious
doubts about their guilt. It does not deter crime; countries who execute commonly cite the death
penalty as a way to deter people from committing crime. This claim has been repeatedly
discredited, and there is no evidence that the death penalty is any more effective in reducing
crime than life imprisonment. It is often used within skewed justice systems, in many cases
recorded by Amnesty International, people were executed after being convicted in grossly unfair
trials, on the basis of torture-tainted evidence and with inadequate legal representation. In some
countries death sentences are imposed as the mandatory punishment for certain offences,
meaning that judges are not able to consider the circumstances of the crime or of the defendant
before sentencing. It is discriminatory; the weight of the death penalty is disproportionally
carried by those with less advantaged socio-economic backgrounds or belonging to a racial,
ethnic or religious minority. This includes having limited access to legal representation, for
example, or being at greater disadvantage in their experience of the criminal justice system.

There are countries who still favour on having death penalty. One of the countries who
favor death penalty is the America; there are many reasons why Americans supports the death
penalty. Those reasons are seen in the survey entitled Understanding Americans' Support for the
Death Penalty of Jeffrey M. Jones, other Americans supports death penalty because they believe
that once you commit a crime you should face the consequences and you deserve the said
punishment, and comes in the saying that “an eye for an eye and tooth for a tooth.” That’s the
reason why Americans supports death penalty.

In my own claim, when talking about legalization of death penalty in the Philippines, is
not a good idea for now. Thinking that the justice system in the Philippines is slow in finding the
real criminal for that crime. Let’s think that when we legalize the death penalty in the Philippines
what will happen to the person and to the family of that person who is wrongly accused to the
crime. Let’s say that, the person is accused for committing rape in a 12 years old child, but the
police have no solid evidence that proves that the person really commits the crime and
sometimes there could be planted evidences to support their claim. In that case the accused
person will face the death penalty, knowing that he didn’t commit the crime. Our justice system
in the Philippines is not yet ready to bring back the death penalty bill. Consequentialism is
present in this paper, knowing that consequentialism is an ethical position in which an act is
justified on the basis of its outcome. The end justifies the means’ is the popular expression of
this idea. When we imagine what will be the result of death penalty if it will be legalize in the
Philippines, many will surely suffer.