Punishment: Denalty Penalty Law

God gave us this precious life. God is good and perfect. He created human beings according to His likeness. And they are called to be compassionate as their Father is compassionate.

The question then o the taking of life as punishment for heinous crimes comes to mind when we talk about life as a gift from God. Is the execution o convicted offenders necessary to bring justice to their victims?

A sovereign nation has its own set of laws and policies that govern its people, or its citizens. But there are some laws and policies that ought to be abolished by society. One is Capital Punishment, the law of man that punishes with death any person convicted or allegedly guilty of a heinous crime. This has caused uproar of protests among concerned sectors of our society. It was one of the controversial issues in which the highest court of the land – the Supreme Court became principally involved. Popular opinions suggest that Death Penalty Law would deter the compassion h heinous crime. Still others suggest that without it, our society would be roofing a flock of criminals.

But what do I really think, aim or really express in this blog? For one, that crimes are just the reflection of the ills of a society. And will never be at peace without addressing our society’s most dreaded diseases – poverty and defective criminal justice system. If you’re poor, you’ll die by lethal injection. But if you are rich, you may escape death through proper connections because you have all the money to buy your way out o conviction.

The Death Penalty Law will not deter the commission of heinous crimes in our society. History would attest to this. For it had implanted during the Marcos regime and it never solved criminality.

If the government sincerely craves for peace, it should first address the root-causes of criminality – crisis an poverty. But if not, genuine peace which we have been longing for will never reign in our society. At the very least, the government must lower the death penalty to mere life imprisonment. The law o the state should reflect the moral law that is interpreted according to its spirit. It must be interpreted to reflect reality.

The law should reassert the role o the reasoning heart in moral decision making. It must be the moral duty of the government to rehabilitate criminals so that they could get back into a normal life. Death is not the answer.

It is the ills of the society that has driven man towards evil. This of course does not mean that I am denying personal responsibility and the tendency of each of us to do evil. But we should always consider that the sinful tendency of each of us is a reality we are born into. No one should be self-righteous and vengeful so as to demand that the life of another be taken for the wrong he had committed. And I believe that to be a Christian, is to allow the grace of God to change a person and not to end that hope toward transformation.