Let’s talk about death

Rhona Canoy

SO… It has never been my habit to jump into a public discussion simply because that activity as a rule achieves nothing but divisiveness. It is difficult to objectively assess one’s perspective when people whose opinions you don’t share digress from the issue at hand and instead become personal in their attacks.

However, this one is just too good to pass up. The past couple of weeks have seen the discussion about the death penalty take various forms, especially after the brutal death of Inday Dayo, the Balinado family’s trusted and long-time help. When the death penalty bill passed in the lower house, violent reactions from all sides rose up, like the smell of hot asphalt when the rain comes.

As is my wont, I am finding it difficult to focus only on the matter of the death penalty. I have this terrible habit of using a mental wide-angle lens to understand things, frequently much to my detriment. At any rate, I started looking at history. Through the centuries, people have died as an adjunct of religious war, as a form of punishment, or as a penal consequence. Even the Bible has references to people being stoned (not the smoking kind) to death for grievous if not heinous offenses. “Off with their heads” was a frequent sentence in French history, and this phrase has even found its way into children’s literature (reread your Alice, please).

Fast forward to the now of Philippine discussion. As proven not just by time but by events, people’s reactions to death from a political standpoint is colored if not tempered by religious opinions. Arguments about the taking of a person’s life as wrong has been sliced by religious sentiments. Please read on before you decide to call me a murderer (or disallow the printing of this column, Boss H).

Do not under any circumstance confuse or equate the death penalty to EJKs or to heinous crimes resulting in death. At its most simple and most objective, if we are to espouse death as a punishment for heinous crimes (certainly there are other acts which should be included in that joke of a death penalty bill Congress successfully emasculated), I cannot see it as a crime deterrent. Truly, if a stiff penalty such as death is a deterrent, that would be deeply personal in nature. By this I mean that the person contemplating such acts would decide to be deterred from doing so by some sort of moral compass. Most armchair criminals have it, which keeps their latent evil butts inactive. At its simplest, it would be the price paid for an act willfully committed (as an aside, that’s a lot of double letters in two words!). If you kill someone and somehow manage to get caught with enough evidence to convict you, you would have known beforehand what would happen. So accept your fate. As simple as that.

Religious and humanitarian reasons decrying death in an intended context can be justified. Respect for human life is the most common one. Sinuswerte ang kriminal. To be afforded the respect they did not and cannot give to another human being is truly hitting the jackpot. Argue human rights all you want. Yes, life is a human right. For everyone. Whether it is by trial or extrajudicially (all killings not ordered by court are extrajudicial, including Dayo’s), that argument will always exist.

But nobody argues whether it is humane. So the wrongdoer is sentenced to life imprisonment. Where’s the human right in that? Deprived of freedoms, with their only positive social contribution being not allowing them to be part of society. Where’s the humaneness in that? Our human rights advocates should take it one majorly big step further. Don’t just argue the human’s right to life. Work on how to rehabilitate them so that, for those who have a chance of being released, they become positive upstanding members of the society they morally and certainly legally wronged.

Statistics show that criminals become hardened in jail and that a lot of them will (if the police do their job) find their way back to their freely-provided-but-very-limited domicile. So to whom should we shower human rights? On those who have done wrong? Or on those wronged? And that’s not even talking about the contraceptive issue of right-to-life versus right-to-birth. I’m saving that for another column. Maybe the question we should ask ourselves is this: do we understand the difference between human and humane?

I’m beginning to wonder what Patrick Henry meant when he said, “Give me liberty or give me death!”