Gloria Arroyo, President of the Philippines, has signed legislation abolishing the death penalty. This move comes on the eve of a visit to see Pope Benedict XVI and only two weeks after the legislation was confirmed by Congress. The change in sentencing law will lead to more than 1,200 prisoners having their sentences changed to life imprisonment.
Arroyo has made assurances that "we shall continue to devote the increasing weight of our resources to the prevention and control of serious crimes, rather than take the lives of those who commit them". She was keen to emphasise that her country was not soft on terrorism.
In the Philippines, the death penalty was originally abolished in 1987, but it was reintroduced in 1993. Since then seven people have been executed. Abolition of the death penalty has generally occurred in correlation with increasing democratisation in nation-states around the world. * Death sentence is the judicial decree; execution is the actual killing * It has been already abolished twice, first was on 1987, then reintroduced in 1993, and abolished the second time on 2006 by Gloria Arroyo * Justice is better implemented by making him chargeable for what he has done and letting him suffer while he is living; killing a person is like letting a prisoner run away from what he has done * Why would the court even implement a law to prevent murders and other instances wherein a person has to be killed when they would be the judge if a person were to be killed or not, if the death penalty law were approved? * Killing a person is giving him a chance to run from a punishment he deserves * Death sentence is immediately sentencing a person to execution once he has done a crime equaling to death, when the court approves this, it means there is a chance that they might be killing an innocent person, whereas when they let him live,