Mac Valledor“Sisipain lang po iyong upuan… Pwede lang po natin sabihin na natumba ang upuan. (You will just have to kick the chair… We can just say the chair feel off),” Sen. Manny Pacquiao said on his preference for hanging as a cost-effective form of death penalty, rousing Sen. Tito Sotto and other people inside the Senate session hall into laughter.
I suppose many other Filipinos were not amused even slightly.
More recently, Speaker Pantaleon Alvarez, who prefers whatever is the cheapest form of death penalty, said that lawmakers should not argue if death by hanging, firing squad, or lethal injection is better because all death row convicts will end up dead anyway.
President Duterte, on the other hand, wants the shock value of a double hanging. What is double hanging you ask? It is distressing to even write about it— President Duterte explained, “After the first hanging, there will be another ceremony for the second time until the head is completely severed from the body.” How extremely disturbing, indeed!
Now, is it right to use economic reason as basis for the selection of the form of death penalty?
Let me begin by saying that I do not rigidly prescribe to ideas of harm- and culpabilityanking to the categorical rejection of rational and legitimate competing ideas, to the belittling of the authority of political institutions and communities to cope with violent crime according to their best judgments and lived experiences. Indeed, I advocate a primary role for political actors in the national debate over the death penalty, hoping for a country committed to a just, fair, limited, yet robust system of capital punishment, but still preferring political abolition.
However, I have never held that all political arguments, for or against the death penalty, are created equal, and now I must aim my thrust at an upsetting congressional proposition by prominent lawmakers. As a consequence of the prevalence of heinous and violent crimes and the meager resources available for criminal rehabilitation, there is a movement afoot to reinstate the use of capital punishment. I fear the current debate over the cost of the death penalty is moving us toward asking mainly, if not entirely, about financial considerations in making legislative choices about the death penalty, and that the debate will no longer focus on moral judgments about culpability and harm when deciding how to justly punish heinous crimes against the person or the state.
This is not to say that financial considerations have no place in the death penalty debate. Capital punishment is, after all, a government program and, like other government programs, there is political sensitivity, if not necessity, in securing that taxpayer money is spent effectively and responsibly. Even if the argument about the high costs of the death penalty has been with us for years, the argument appears to have particular force. My interest, however, is that, in spite of assurances from some lawmakers and the President that it does not rank at the top of their arguments on the best form of capital punishment, the financial argument will become dispositive.
So, in view of the present idea that public money should be spent mainly on programs that improve economic conditions, it is not counterintuitive to fear that the financial argument will be changed from merely a factor in the debate to the factor in the debate. The risk, then, is that legislative and executive arguments about how best to penalize heinous crimes of violence will be based on peso value, rather than competing intellections of harm and culpability, and will in effect sabotage the moral justifications underlying criminal punishment.
Criminal sentence and penalization shows the political community’s moral disapproval of an individual and his acts. It is a grave duty of the state to inflict suffering on another; especially in a society of ordered freedom, it needs justification. The primary justifications for criminal punishment, retributivism and utilitarianism, focus on the suitable punishment for a given crime or kind of offender by weighing the culpability of the offender, the harm he has caused, or the benefit to society (in the form of reduced crime) that will come from punishing him and punishing him in a particularly way. The financial argument, however, fails to account for the individual or societal harm that a crime may cause, or the moral culpability of a person who is convicted of a heinous crime, or the deterrent effect that a given form of penalty may have on the offender and others in the community. Hence, when the financial argument displaces these concerns, the criminal law is deprived of much of its moral legitimacy. It follows that when the law strips the community of its power to ascertain whether or not an offender deserves the death penalty because of his moral blameworthiness and the serious harm he has caused, only because the government chose to strip the community of that authority as a cost-saving and economical decision, we can no longer be assured about the effectiveness of the moral disapproval that the criminal law finally brings to bear upon that offender. When this is true, punishment, instead of reflecting society’s valid moral response to crime, looks more like a cheap reprieve. Furthermore, giving importance to the financial argument will ultimately serve as a distraction from, and thus weaken, other, rightful arguments in support of capital punishment. If we choose to live in a society in which capital punishment is available say in the form of hanging or firing squad, let it not be because, in the end, we merely chose the alternative that cost us the least.
Consider some especially notable heinous offenders. Julio Gullien was executed for attempting to assassinate President Manuel Roxas. Marciál “Baby” Ama was electrocuted at the age of 16 for murders committed while in prison for lesser charges. Rafael Lacson, the former powerful governor of Negros Occidental was sentenced to death for murdering his political opponent. President Ferdinand Marcos was also sentenced to death in 1939 (ultimately acquitted on appeal) for the murder of Julio Nalundasan, his father’s political rival. Consider Jaime José, Basilio Pineda, and Edgardo Aquino who were electrocuted for the abduction and gangape of Maggie dela Riva. Consider the drug trafficker Lim Seng, whose execution by firing squad was broadcasted on national television. Consider the notorious mass murderers of our time.
It is not hard to list the atrocious murders and heinous crimes that have forced our communities to exercise difficult moral judgments about the punishment that should befall heinous offenders. Some killers in times when the death penalty still stood received the death penalty, some did not. However, think that rather than inquire about the nature of the crime, the moral depravation of the defendant’s action, the culpability of the individual defendants involved, or the consequence that a particular punishment may have in preventing other socially heinous acts, the supreme question we ask when deciding the kind of punishment that has to be inflicted for these crimes is whether we could finance the process for performing the more conscionable punishment.
There is possibly a deeper lesson for politicians here. Despite the sometimes perverted public outcry over undue government expenditures and the impulse to fulfill the immediate passions of citizens who concurrently require that the government always choose among the cheapest alternatives while also exacting that the same government spend vast amounts on programs that will serve their own interests, the republican lawmaker must be reminded of his duty to amend and elaborate the public consciousness to serve as a filter for and to moderate public passions, and to fight the temptation to satisfy the unmediated desires of a demanding public. He or she must also fight the urge to reduce every essential legislative determination, especially when the state actively deprives a citizen of his/her life, to simple calculation of cost.
Making certain that the government renders a proper and fitting punishment for heinous crimes is one of those decisions that need consideration beyond the economic. It needs recognizing that the moral justifications for and the deterrent effect of capital punishment ought to serve as the primary bases of penal law, and it needs painstaking discussion about the meaning of suffering and of life, and of justice and the duty of the state in dispensing it. Whom, how, and especially why we penalize says much about the type of people we are, particularly our vision of and allegiance to justice. We belittle the substance of this determination, our moral authority to penalize, and our consciousness about justice—we degrade them—if we regard the debate over the death penalty as we would regard the financing of a highway project or a new international airport. There are serious perils to society by giving great importance to the financial arguments for the form of death penalty. As time passes, the impairment of government expenditure is, with careful prioritizing and disciplined administration, a reconcilable, if still complex, problem. It will be far far more difficult, nonetheless, to fix the impairment of justice.
(Mac Valledor is a professor of molecular and computational neuroscience and behavioural economics in a ranking London university. He also leads a practice of management consultants, advises FTSE 100 companies and the UK Conservative government on key policy issues, and is a former investment banker.)
