President Duterte Calls to Revive the Death Penalty

The president of the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte, requested to revive the death penalty a few days ago, solely for drug-related crimes.

HIgh level drug offenders could go from prison to the death penalty, if Filipino President Rodrigo Duterte’s call to revive it is sucessful. Jody Davis. CC0.

Filipino President Rodrigo Duterte asked Congress to revive the death penalty for drug-related crimes on July 22, during his State of the Nation Address (SONA).

Speaking before a joint session of Congress, he first brought up the revival as the first priority legislative measure in his fourth Address, according to Rappler. His party, PDP-Laban, currently has a supermajority in the House of Representatives. He mentioned the 5-month siege that evolved between the state and extremists after terrorists held onto drugs in Marawi in May 2017, citing it as a prime example as to why further action and harsher actions were and are necessary.

Duterte’s war on drugs has been ongoing since his candidacy in 2016. He has been calling for the reinstatement of the death penalty for the same length of time. He also requested capital punishment in his 2017 SONA.

Senator Ronald dela Rosa, a trusted aide to the president, won his senatorial election in 2019 on a single promise: to bring back the death penalty for drug-related crimes.

Duterte also effectively began a war on corruption in Filipino society. On July 19, three dozen of Duterte’s critics were charged with sedition and cyber libel after a series of anonymous videos that accuse the president and his family of having monetary links to the illegal drug trade, according to Newsweek. 

Amnesty International believes the call will only increase the country’s environment of exemption from punishment during the continuous war on drugs.

However, Senate President Vicente Sotto III believes that restricting the reinstatemnt of capital punishment to high-level offenders would be more likely to pass in the Senate. He also mentioned this bill would be among the first to be discussed. Two years ago, the House of Representatives passed a measure for the death penalty for crimes related to drugs.

“The state of our nation is a state of mourning. We should not be burying our children amid deadly and ill-conceived police raids,” said Butch Olano, Section Director for Amnesty International Philippines, according to Amnesty International.

There has been one conviction of police officers, for the killing of a 17-year-old boy. During a police operation in late June 2019, a three-year-old girl and a police officer were killed. The girl’s mother and the government both have different stories about the operation. Overall, so far the Philippine government has noted at least 6,000 killings at the hands of police officers. Amnesty International has found that there are many more unlawful killings, likely done by armed people with ties to the police.

Olano says that, despite being told to file cases before the courts if they feel there has been an unlawful death or that the police have acted illegally, many families are too afraid to speak up. There are also the problems of costs or being unable to secure evidence or the police reports.

The Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights is meant to deliver a report in June 2020 on the state of human rights in the Philippines. President Duterte’s remarks didn’t commit to assisting with this report, which was requested last month in a resolution by the UN Human Rights Council, particularly since Duterte has been accused of human rights abuses. 

Duterte has been battling against drugs since before he was elected in 2016. Requesting the revival of the death penalty for drug-related crimes may be extreme, but it isn’t terribly unexpected from this president. If this request passes, Duterte’s war on society’s corruption will most likely increase, as he will have already have gained one victory. Amnesty International’s prediction also seems likely of coming true. However, if this request isn’t passed, it’ll be a blow to Duterte’s war on drugs. The war itself will continue, but this particular battle won’t. The human rights report will be written throughout this year and next, regardless of what happens with the death penalty. President Duterte is already under investigation, though the Philippines will become an even more dangerous place if the death penalty is passed in any form.

NOEMI ARELLANO-SUMMER is a journalist and writer living in Boston, MA. She is a voracious reader and has a fondness for history and art. She is currently at work on her first novel and wants to eventually take a trip across Europe.

The Death Penalty, an American Tradition on the Decline

Capital punishment has been practiced on American soil for more than 400 years. Historians have documented nearly 16,000 executions, accomplished by burning, hanging, firing squad, electrocution, lethal gas and lethal injection. An untold number of others have doubtlessly occurred yet escaped recognition.

We helped create the University at Albany’s National Death Penalty Archive, a rich repository of primary source material encompassing the long and growing history of the death penalty.

Capital punishment has long been and continues to be controversial, but there is no disputing its historical and contemporary significance. More than 2,700 men and women are currently under sentence of death throughout the U.S., although they are distributed in wildly uneven fashion. California’s death row, by far the nation’s largest, tops out at well over 700, while three or fewer inmates await execution in seven states.

Executions similarly vary markedly by jurisdiction. Texas has been far and away the leader over the last half century, with five times as many executions as the next leading state.

The book ‘Not in Our Name: Murder Victims Families Speak Out against the Death Penalty,’ published in 1997. Murder Victims' Families for Reconciliation Records, University at Albany, CC BY-ND

Prized archives

We established the National Death Penalty Archive to help preserve a record of the country’s past and current capital punishment policies and practices, and to ensure that scholars and the general public can gain access to this critical information.

The archive currently holds numerous collections from diverse sources, including academics, activists, litigators and researchers. We remain open to new donations of materials relating to capital punishment. The materials are stored in a climate-controlled environment and are accessible to the public.

One of our prized collections is the voluminous set of execution records compiled by M. Watt Espy Jr. Espy spent more than three decades, encompassing the 1960s into the 1990s, traversing the countryside, collaborating with others to uncover primary and secondary sources documenting more than 15,000 executions carried out in the U.S. between the 1600s and the late 20th century. Espy’s data set has since been updated to include information on executions through 2002.

The National Death Penalty Archive houses the court records, newspaper articles, magazine stories, bulletins, photographs and index cards created for each execution that Espy and his assistants painstakingly collected. These items vividly capture this unparalleled history of executions within the American colonies and the U.S.

Among those documented is the 1944 electrocution in South Carolina of George Stinney Jr., who at age 14 was the youngest person punished by death during the 20th century. Seventy years later, a South Carolina judge vacated Stinney’s conviction, ruling that he did not receive a fair trial.

In July, after the documents are fully digitized, the National Death Penalty Archive will make all of Espy’s materials available online.

Other papers

Another prized holding consists of nearly 150 boxes of materials from Eugene Wanger. As a delegate to the Michigan Constitutional Convention, Wanger drafted the provision prohibiting capital punishment that was incorporated into the state constitution in 1961.

For more than 50 years, Wanger compiled a treasure trove of items spanning the 18th through 21st centuries relating to the death penalty, including numerous rare documents and paraphernalia. Among the thousands of items in the extensive bibliography are copies of anti-capital-punishment essays written by Pennsylvania’s Benjamin Rush shortly after the nation’s founding.

We also have collected the work of notable scholars. For example, the National Death Penalty Archive houses research completed by the late David Baldus, known primarily for his analysis of racial disparities in the administration of the death penalty; the writings of the late Hugo Adam Bedau, perhaps the country’s leading philosopher on issues of capital punishment; and the papers of the late Ernest van den Haag, a prolific academic proponent of capital punishment.

The National Death Penalty Archive additionally contains more than 150 clemency petitions filed on behalf of condemned prisoners, as well as materials relating to notable U.S. Supreme Court decisions, including Ford v. Wainwright, prohibiting execution of the insane, and Herrera v. Collins, in which the justices were asked to rule that the Constitution forbids executing an innocent person wrongfully sentenced to death.

Remarks by Hugo Bedau against the death penalty in 1958. Hugo Bedau Papers, University at Albany, CC BY-ND

On the decline

The recent history of capital punishment in the U.S. has been marked by declining popularity and usage. Within the past 15 years, eight states have abandoned the death penalty through legislative repeal or judicial invalidation.

The number of new death sentences imposed annually nationwide has plummeted from more than 300 in the mid-1990s to a fraction of that – just 42 – in 2018. Last year, there were 25 executions in the U.S., down from the modern-era high of 98 in 1999.

Meanwhile, public support for capital punishment as measured by the Gallup Poll registered at 56 percent in 2018, compared to its peak of 80 percent in 1995. Only a few counties, primarily within California and a few southern states, are responsible for sending vastly disproportionate numbers of offenders to death row.

What these trends bode for the future of the death penalty in the U.S. remains to be seen. When later generations reflect on the nation’s long and complicated history with the death penalty, we hope that the National Death Penalty Archive will offer important insights into the currents that have helped shape it.

JAMES ACKER is a distinguished teaching Professor of Criminal Justice at the University at Albany, State University of New York.

BRIAN KEOUGH is the Co-Director at the National Death Penalty Archive at University at Albany, State University of New York.

THIS ARTICLE WAS ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED ON THE CONVERSATION

Female Saudi Arabian Activist on Death Row for Peaceful Protest

On August 21, 2018, Saudi Arabian public prosecutors announced that they were considering the death penalty for five Saudi Shia activists. One of the five is Israa al-Ghomgham, a female activist who could become the first woman sentenced to death in Saudi Arabia. Ghomgham, along with four other Saudi Shia activists including her husband, engaged in peaceful demonstrations for Shia rights beginning in 2011 during the rise of the Arab Spring, which led to their 2015 arrests.

Saudi Arabian Flag. Iqbal Osman. Wikimedia Commons

“Any execution is appalling, but seeking the death penalty for activists like Israa al-Ghomgham, who are not even accused of violent behavior, is monstrous,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, who directs the Middle East sector of Human Rights Watch. “Every day, the Saudi monarchy’s unrestrained despotism makes it harder for its public relations teams to spin the fairy tale of ‘reform’ to allies and international business.”

Responding to peaceful protests with the death penalty is compromising both to proponents of human decency and order, and these actions are symptomatic of a larger illness. If Saudi Arabia is to continue to suppress and murder its own citizens, its actions could lead to its internal combustion. To preserve its tenuous position of prosperity, the Saudi Arabian government must honor the voices of its insurgents—or at least allow them to live.

Saudi Arabia, a desert country in the Middle East said to be the birthplace of Islam, holds a complex position at the pinnacle of capital and culture. It has the world’s third highest national total estimated value of natural resources. It is home to the world’s largest oil company, and it has been the proponent of various reform agendas, significant amount of money invested in solar energy. It is also ruled by the ultraconservative Wahhabi religious movement, which is part of Sunni Islam.

It has shown support for counterterrorism and revolutionary liberal and Arab Spring ideals and has supported rebel forces in Syria and Yemen, but internally it has been a breeding ground for violent forms of radical Islam, placing it at a crux between the most progressive and oppressive sides of the ideological spectrum. The nation’s 32-year-old king, Mohammed bin Salman, has been pushing to modernize his country, opening movie theatres and allowing women to drive for the first time—but his actions towards protestors despite his presentation of liberalism rings eerily close to the actions of Bashar al Assad, Syrian president who also began his reign by encouraging Westernization in Syria before cracking down on protestors and unleashing a bloody civil war. Under Salman, critics of the Saudi Arabian regime have been arrested in scores, and 58 people are currently on death row. Many of these prisoners are women, often arrested for protesting the country’s guardianship system, which places Saudi Arabian men in almost complete control of their daughters’ or wives’ lives.

Israa al-Ghomgham and her husband were arrested on December 5, 2015, and are on trial at the Specialized Criminal Court, which Saudi Arabia installed in 2008 and which has drawn expense criticism from human rights activists, sentencing eight protestors to death in 2014 and 14 in 2016. Currently human rights campaigners are working to secure her freedom and life.

EDEN ARIELLE GORDON is a writer, musician, and avid traveler. She attends Barnard College in New York.