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Tuesday, April 18, 2006
Malilong: When crime victims become desperate
By Frank Malilong Jr.
The Other Side
JOJO dela Victoria was murdered before President Arroyo commuted all death sentences to life terms, so there couldn’t have been a relationship between the daring and brazenness of Jojo’s killer and the President’s virtual abolition of the death penalty.
The killer would probably still be sentenced to death, assuming that he is arrested, given the presence of many circumstances that aggravate his offense. I doubt, however, that he would ever be executed, considering the government’s history of vacillation towards capital punishment. Those who believe - and I’m sure there are many of them - that justice to Jojo can be done only if his killer is made to pay for his crime with his own life, may have to do it their own way.
And there lies the danger. The law imposing capital punishment for certain specified offenses may not have deterred the commission of these crimes, but it has at least given hope to the victims and their families that their tormentor will be dealt with by the law with the same degree of finality.
We can write tomes about the sacredness of human life and why we should not play God with the lives of other people, including even those of murderers and rapists. But tell that to the son who has lost his father to murder or the parents of a young girl who has been gang-raped. After their shock shall have turned to grief and grief to anger, they will demand retribution.
Anger will turn to desperation when they realize that no such retribution is forthcoming through the established legal system because the President has emasculated the law that would have made it obtainable. Desperate people are not far from taking the law into their own hands.
The President was within her powers in declaring that all death sentences be commuted to life imprisonment. Whether her decision was wise is an entirely different matter, however. First of all, she put to waste all the efforts of the police and the prosecutors to convince the judge to impose the death penalty. She also rendered useless the hours that the judges spent agonizing over whether or not to condemn the accused to death.
But most of all, she has made Congress look funny, if not ridiculous by her wholesale reduction of the penalty of all death convicts. It was if she was telling Congress that they passed a bad law and that she has taken it upon herself to correct them.
A more considerate, if not respectful, approach would have been to tell the legislators to abolish the death penalty law by certifying as urgent a bill to repeal it. But no, she needed the pogi points very badly and more urgently, so let Congress be damned. She always got what she wanted from Congress anyway.
Some people are now paying the wages of servility.
(fmmalilong@yahoo.com)
For Bisaya stories from Cebu. Click here. (April 18, 2006 issue)
Write letter to the editor.Click here.
Join the Sun.Star message board.Click here.
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