Death Row reflects Philippine society

HUMAN-RIGHTS groups were relieved by President Arroyo’s Black Saturday announcement commuting all death sentences to life terms. While anti-crime groups were angry and disappointed by what they deem is the government’s laxity in the face of rising criminality, especially a resurgence in kidnapping, rights groups have welcomed the stay on the executions.

One of their most powerful arguments is that most of those who are sentenced to death are poor and not properly represented by lawyers during their trial. The majority were also arrested without warrants and were not assisted by counsel during police investigation, questioning and interrogation. Rights groups also say many of the convicts were tortured.

Death row, human-rights advocates say, reflects the inequities of the Philippine justice system. Moreover, they argue that there is no evidence that the death penalty deters crime.

In a 2004 survey of 1,121 death row inmates, the Free Legal Assistance Group (FLAG) found that “the profile of death row is the profile of the poor in Philippine society: largely uneducated, largely unemployed and generally living in poverty.” The highest educational attainment of most inmates, said FLAG, is elementary education. About a third of all death row convicts, it said, are farm workers. Only 16 percent are professionals, with the rest being in services, construction and transport. In addition, FLAG found that 51 percent of the convicts earn below the minimum wage.

“A majority of the inmates admitted that they knew of the death penalty before they committed their offenses;” says the FLAG study, “this knowledge seems to indicate that the death penalty, by and of itself, is no deterrent to crime. Yet, more than half of the death inmates, while knowing about the death penalty, did not know that the crimes for which they were sentenced to death were subject to capital punishment. These contradictory findings do not help answer the issue of whether the death penalty deters crime.”

“What is clear,” says FLAG, “is that those inmates who knew about the death penalty and who knew that their offenses were subject to the death penalty were simply not deterred (by it).”

The FLAG survey shows that 22 percent or 198 of 1,121 of all death row inmates were convicted of murder and/or parricide; 45 percent (405) were found guilty of rape; 14.5 percent (129) of kidnaping; 11 percent (101) of robbery; 0.4 percent (4) of carnapping; 0.8 percent (7) of bribery; and three percent (26) of violation of dangerous drugs laws.

FLAG says that death row convicts represent the ills of the country’s criminal justice system. “A fair criminal justice system is essential in capital cases,” the report says. “Yet in the Philippines, the criminal justice system is fraught with defects: faulty police work, coerced confessions, prosecutorial misconduct, inept defense counsel, mistaken or perjured testimony and trial court decisions based on seemingly inconclusive evidence.”

FLAG cites the fact that the Supreme Court itself, in a 2004 decision, pegged the judicial error rate at 72 percent. It says that the high tribunal found police irregularities — including the use of shortcuts, or planted and recycled evidence — in the investigation of capital crimes.

The police investigative manual itself, says FLAG, ranks the most important evidence as confessions, followed in descending order by eyewitness testimony, circumstantial evidence and associate evidence. “As a result, in practice the police tend to focus on a suspect and then gather evidence to incriminate him/her. A suspect’s alibi is rarely, if ever, verified by the police to exclude the suspect as a perpetrator of the crime.”

In addition, FLAG cites the problem of incompetent counsel representing those charged with capital crimes. It also lists the following anomalies:

• 74 percent of death row inmates were arrested without warrants;

• 78 percent of inmates were not informed of their constitutional rights at the time of their arrest;

• 90 percent were not assisted bv counsel during police investigation, questioning and interrogation;

• 13.5 percent claimed they were forced to confess to their crimes;

• 45.1 percent claimed the police tortured them, with a third of those tortured saying they had been beaten, a quarter claiming they were threatened verbally with a gun, and the rest saying they were given electric shock or the “water cure,” pistol-whipped, deprived of food and water, and suffocated with a plastic bag.

• 28 percent never had a consultation with their trial lawyer and 25 percent said they had between two and five consultations with counsel; only 23 percent had more frequent consultations with their lawyers.

Click here for the full FLAG report, “Socio-Economic Profile of Capital Offenders in the Philippines.”