The Death Penalty for Teenagers
Manila Times
December 18, 1999
The death penalty for teenagers KING Herod, the ruthless and despotic tyrant that ruled Palestine during the birth of Jesus Christ had one solution to any threat to law and order, his throne and authority--death. Swift, and merciless execution preceded by the cruelest of torture if possible was his forte. For him there was no difference between adults, teenagers or children, he slaughtered them by the hundreds for good measure just to be sure he got the right one.
We have our modern-day Herods that fill the cemeteries with corpses and the hearts of widows and mothers with grief and suffering. Salvaging, the solution of the incompetent and the corrupt, follow any accusing finger and pull the trigger.
I am not referring to the mayor of Davao Benjamin de Guzman who has filed a P50-million libel suit against the human rights team of the PREDA Foundation where I work. With many others, we protested the salvaging of teenagers and the harassment of streetchildren by vigilante death squads on the streets of Davao. We urged the mayor to investigate without delay. The mayor did not realize that we were trying to help him end the killing and make Davao the most child-friendly city in the Philippines. For all our pains we were misunderstood and got a libel suit.
Since the death penalty cannot be legally imposed on any teenager under 18 years of age either extra-judicially or judicially there are two bills pending in Congress that will impose death by lethal injection on juveniles 16 years of age if found guilty by a court of law. This piece of misguided proposed legislation has been made by Congressman Roilo Golez when he filed House Bill 8286 and another filed by Senator Robert Barbers in the Senate Bill 1701.
Such laws will contradict Article 37 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child which the Philippine Congress has ratified. Article 37 states the following:
(a) No child shall be subjected to torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. Neither capital punishment nor life imprisonment without the possibility of release shall be imposed for offenses committed by persons below 18 years of age.
The present family code does not condemn a teenager 18 or below to prison or the death penalty instead it refers the offender to the Department of Social Welfare and Development for the rehabilitation of the minor. This is the humane and compassionate approach that recognizes the inherent dignity and worth of the offender and strives to give him or her a chance to start a new.
It recognizes too that children are born innocent and it is only through the bad example, neglect and ignorance of adults that the child becomes emotionally unstable and a danger to others. The law takes into consideration the psychological, social and economic circumstance that may have aggravated his condition that brought him to commit the offense, drugs, bad example, pornography or the like. It is only when the youth refuses to respond to treatment and rehabilitation and repeats such crimes will the appropriate penalty be imposed by the court. Even then the Juvenile is not to be treated as an adult criminal and the death penalty shall not be imposed. The proposed legislation to lower the age to 16 whereby the death penalty can be imposed is mistaken in believing that harsh and cruel punishments can strike fear and trembling into the hearts of would-be rapists and murderers, even teenagers, and deter them from their crimes, is a false assumption.
Such crimes are most frequently crimes of passion, at times drug induced, or with impaired knowledge or maturity and committed with diminished responsibility. With adults the death penalty has done nothing to deter heinous crime, in fact it has tended to increase it. The child rapist will be all the more motivated to kill his victims and thus remove the only witness. Others will rape all the more children, telling themselves that they might as well be executed for one rape as for many. The confessions of serial child rapists and murderers in Columbia and Pakistan in recent months is an indication of this.
More than 20 child-caring non-government organizations have banded together in a coalition to oppose the new bills. They have declared the bills to be illegal, unconstitutional, cruel, unjust, inhuman and anti-children and they are organizing a great march f6r children's rights today 18 December starting at the Bustillos Church at 12 noon and then march behind a symbolic funeral cortege on the way to Mendiola. The organizers then plan to dramatize what the death penalty means for children.
No doubt you are planning to give gifts to needy children this Christmas in remembrance of the child Jesus who had a death sentence waiting for him as soon as he was born and became an impoverished refugee within weeks. Your gift will delight the child for a while and then fade. You could do better than to join the march for children's rights this Saturday and give the Filipino youth a gift that will never fade--the right to a life of decency and dignity and free from the cruel and unjust punishment of the penalty of death. Jesus came into the world to bring life and it's our collective responsibility to see that it is preserved, we are all created in God’s image and likeness, a truth worth remembering.
