SunWuKong
12-28-2003, 01:43 PM
Philippines 'restores' death penalty
By John McLean
BBC correspondent in Manila
You would have thought that Filipinos would be a bit squeamish about capital punishment.
After all, their National Hero, Jose Rizal - the father of the movement for independence from Spain - was publicly executed by a Spanish firing squad.
He was lucky.
The Spaniards' usual method of dispatching rebellious natives was to garrotte them.
The Spanish colonial masters were replaced by the Americans, who brought the electric chair with them.
There are still many Filipinos who remember the Japanese occupation, and who speak with horror of the Japanese soldiers' habit of lopping off the heads of people who annoyed them.
Yet the squeamishness took effect only after the overthrow of the cruel and corrupt regime of President Ferdinand Marcos.
His regime, in addition to murdering countless political opponents, also revived the firing squad to make a public example of one alleged drug trafficker.
On and off
The post-Marcos constitution abolished the death penalty - except for what it called "heinous crimes".
That meant, in effect, that it was abolished totally.
Until the mid-1990s, that is, when - in response to increasing violent crime - a new law restored capital punishment by defining "heinous crimes" as everything from murder to stealing a car.
The new law said convicts would be executed in the electric chair, until a gas chamber could be installed.
The problem was that there was nothing left of the electric chair except a black scorch mark on the floor of the execution chamber.
Some said it had burnt out, the last time it had been used.
So the justice minister was sent to America to buy a gas chamber.
There, the Americans told him that they had not built a gas chamber for decades, and they had forgotten how to do it.
Instead, they offered him some lethal injection equipment, and the justice minister went home and had the law changed again, to allow executions by lethal injection.
more... (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/3337273.stm)
By John McLean
BBC correspondent in Manila
You would have thought that Filipinos would be a bit squeamish about capital punishment.
After all, their National Hero, Jose Rizal - the father of the movement for independence from Spain - was publicly executed by a Spanish firing squad.
He was lucky.
The Spaniards' usual method of dispatching rebellious natives was to garrotte them.
The Spanish colonial masters were replaced by the Americans, who brought the electric chair with them.
There are still many Filipinos who remember the Japanese occupation, and who speak with horror of the Japanese soldiers' habit of lopping off the heads of people who annoyed them.
Yet the squeamishness took effect only after the overthrow of the cruel and corrupt regime of President Ferdinand Marcos.
His regime, in addition to murdering countless political opponents, also revived the firing squad to make a public example of one alleged drug trafficker.
On and off
The post-Marcos constitution abolished the death penalty - except for what it called "heinous crimes".
That meant, in effect, that it was abolished totally.
Until the mid-1990s, that is, when - in response to increasing violent crime - a new law restored capital punishment by defining "heinous crimes" as everything from murder to stealing a car.
The new law said convicts would be executed in the electric chair, until a gas chamber could be installed.
The problem was that there was nothing left of the electric chair except a black scorch mark on the floor of the execution chamber.
Some said it had burnt out, the last time it had been used.
So the justice minister was sent to America to buy a gas chamber.
There, the Americans told him that they had not built a gas chamber for decades, and they had forgotten how to do it.
Instead, they offered him some lethal injection equipment, and the justice minister went home and had the law changed again, to allow executions by lethal injection.
more... (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/3337273.stm)