Wednesday, May 21, 2008 Vigilantes more effective: Tomas
VIGILANTES are more effective in fighting crime than the death penalty, Cebu City Mayor Tomas Osmeña said yesterday. The mayor, however, clarified that he is not pro-vigilantes.
Osmeña issued the statement when asked whether he would support Sen. Juan Miguel Zubiri’s plan to file a bill reviving the death penalty.
In a press conference yesterday, the mayor said the country’s legal system takes such a long time to punish a criminal that the death penalty no longer gives criminals qualms in committing heinous crimes.
“What is the purpose of the death penalty? (It is) to serve as a deterrent (against crimes). But it takes 20 years to execute them (criminals)…. Mas effective pa ang vigilantes. I’m not saying, however, that I’m pro-vigilante,” the mayor said.
Problem
“Our legal system is the problem. A convicted criminal will die first of a heart attack in jail before he is supposed to be put to death,” the mayor said in Bisaya.
He said vigilantes even swiftly punish criminals who had just been released from jail. The mayor was careful with his words, though, as he had been accused before of supporting vigilantism, and had tangled with the Integrated Bar of the Philippines.
Cebu City police officials, meanwhile, said they support Zubiri’s plan.
Senior Supt. Patrocinio Comendador, Cebu City Police Office (CCPO) director, said imposing the death penalty would be a deterrent to criminality.
Criminal Investigation and Intelligence Bureau Chief George Ylanan and Homicide Section Chief Mario Monilar agreed, saying that lawbreakers will think twice before committing heinous crimes.
The officials said that after the death penalty was abolished in 2006 and death sentences were commuted to life imprisonment, the number of heinous crimes increased.
Comendador said that imposing the death penalty is one way of cutting off the “desire and opportunity to commit a crime.”
He said, though, that the criminal justice system should not be selective in imposing the capital punishment. It should not be imposed only on those who were convicted of rape, which constitutes only one percent of crimes.
Drug lords
Convicted drug lords and murderers should be the ones punished with the death penalty, especially those who are engaged in the illegal drug trade, he said.
Monilar believes criminals will have no chance of going back and engaging in their illegal activities because after undergoing trial and due process, a penalty of death
could be imposed on them.
For Monilar, people who are convicted of heinous crimes should be dealt with accordingly, and that the principle of “an eye for an eye; a tooth for a tooth” should apply.
Zubiri has yet to file the bill but he earlier said that he would like criminals convicted of crimes related to drug trafficking and multiple homicide penalized with death.
Senators Loren Legarda, Panfilo Lacson, who had served as chief of the Philippine National Police, and Ramon Revilla Jr. supported Zubiri’s plan, following the gruesome death of 10 people during a bank robbery in Cabuyao, Laguna. (RHM/JST)
