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Manila scraps death penalty
24/06/2006 10:57 - (SA)
Manila - Philippine President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, seeking to shore up support from powerful Roman Catholic bishops, on Saturday signed a law abolishing the death penalty before her imminent visit to the Vatican.
The new law offers a reprieve for more than 1 200 convicts on death row who faced lethal injection.
Some critics said the law was a sop to win Church support for moves to change the constitution and to soften opposition from bishops to a revival of the mining industry.
"We yield to the high moral imperative dictated by God to walk away from capital punishment," Arroyo, a member of the huge Catholic majority in the Philippines, said in a speech.
The president was due to leave on Sunday for state visits to Italy and Spain, including an audience with Pope Benedict XVI at the Vatican and meetings with thousands of Filipino workers in Milan.
"When I meet the Holy Father soon in the Vatican, I shall tell him that we have acted in the name of life for a world of peace and harmony," Arroyo said.
Arroyo, who survived an impeachment attempt last year over persistent allegations of election cheating, had declined to authorise any executions since the start of her presidency in 2001 and commuted all death sentences to life imprisonment in April this year.
Mixed blessing
"We're very happy and thankful to the president," Alfredo Corpuz, 49, sentenced to death in 1996 for kidnapping, told Reuters at the country's main prison in Muntinlupa, about 40 km south of Manila.
"I hope the government could also give us a second chance by reviewing our cases because many of my colleagues on death row were really innocent."
But some convicts were ambivalent, dreading the idea of spending the rest of their lives in jail.
"It's really difficult and very lonely," said Arnel Alicando, 34, who has been on death row since 1994 and has not been visited by his family or friends in more than 10 years. "Sometimes, death is a better option."
The Philippines, whose government and legal systems are based on the US model, abolished capital punishment under its 1987 constitution.
But it was re-imposed under a 1993 law allowing lethal injection for people convicted of serious crimes such as murder, kidnapping, drug trafficking and rape.
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