Tuesday, April 18, 2006
Putting death penalty to death
By Ram Maxey
Bar None
PRESIDENT Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo has no love lost for criminals, especially the heinous-type who indulge in treason, plunder, kidnapping for ransom, murder, rape, and the manufacture and sale of illegal drugs. (If she could have her way, she would only be too happy to include her political foes in that category).
However, she does not relish the thought of having the blood of any of the 1,280 occupants of today's death row on her hand. That is why she announced last (Black) Saturday that henceforth she would commute all death penalties to life imprisonment. Life sentence or reclusion perpetua, based on crimes under the revised penal code, is for 30 years. As I see it, if a death penalty for heinous crime is commuted to life sentence, then it has to be FOR LIFE. Otherwise what is the point? It would still end in the criminal's death (by natural causes). Patay rin.
Upon hearing about the President's policy re the death penalty, there was reportedly much rejoicing along death row. We don't know if someone who is presently on trial for plunder also heaved a sigh of relief.
Instead of life being shortened by lethal injection, it will now be prolonged, albeit behind iron bars. It means forever eating prison food (yeech!), being unable to go malling, and not seeing the glorious morning sun rising in the eastern sky and watching it setting slowly below the western horizon.
Practically shut off from the outside world and hemmed in by high gray concrete walls, the life-termer will always remember how it feels to swim in the sea and not giving a tinker's damn about coliform and fecal pollution. Many will remember how it feels to walk in the park and hear children's laughter. Most of all, sorely missed will be the family gatherings and the happy times with the barkada.
Life imprisonment is not the same as life in the fast lane. It's as if time itself has stood still, so grindingly slow it moves along with the inevitable boredom of a daily 24-hour routine with hardly a break in the monotony of it all -- to the point that, who knows, an inmate who is made of lesser stuff and has lost all hope would rather that he had been administered the lethal injection than having to go through another day of this living death.
Life imprisonment is just that -- a form of slow, painful death. The aching feeling -- sometimes subtle, other times numbing, oftentimes palpable--is felt from moment to moment as the uncounted minutes and hours and days and weeks drag into dreary months and cruel years without hope. In the beginning the "lifer" tends to mark the days that pass, but there will come a time when he will give that up and settles down for the long, oh so long, wait.
The death penalty by lethal injection is so much more humane than electrocution or hanging. It is carried out swiftly and painlessly while the prisoner sleeps.
It is a form of quick release from mundane cares. For death is also freedom. To die is to be free. The kind of freedom many criminals in Davao City have seemingly "opted" for by not heeding the warning to stay away and do their thing elsewhere.
In this beloved city of peace-loving people, every criminal who unluckily dies in the line of "duty" becomes an instant freeman. The lucky stiff.
For Bisaya stories from Davao. Click here. (April 18, 2006 issue)
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