Death Penalty and the International Human Rights Day

We celebrate today the International Human Rights Day. Today has for its main editorial "the heightened threats to human rights" both locally and globally. THe editorial sadly notes that those new threats are coming at a time when human rights have been almost universally acknowledged:

Indeed, just when the sanctity of human rights has achieved near universal acceptance and absolute respect, fresh threats to them have emerged. But this time, the threat to and abuse of human rights no longer comes from or at the hands of agents of brutal elites, but from entire societies, two of them profoundly democratic, which have been so scared out of their wits and stripped of all sense of decency as to clamor like Old Testament savages for a bushel of eyes for an eye, and scores of innocent lives to get at the one or two who are guilty.

The editorial also takes a potshot at the recent decision of GMA to reinstitute the death penalty for kidnappers. Surely, the president could not have chosen a worse time to announce the lifting of the moratorium, with the International Human Rights Day coming and the Christmas Day just around the corner.

Manolo Quezon, though, worries about the constitutionality of a blanket moratorium on the death penalty. He seems to be of the opinion that commuting the death penalty should be on a case-to-case basis because it is founded on the executive privilige of pardon. Quezon writes that:

A president may, in his or her heart of hearts, take a moral position against the death penalty, but it is incumbent on that president to at least maintain the appearance of a personal intervention, a considered decision, by picking up the phone each and every time as the time of execution draws near, to tell the warden the execution has been called off. It reminds everyone concerned that the law was not being thwarted in a general sense, but instead, the maximum penalty substituted for another (death for life imprisonment) on an individual basis. A blanket moratorium is an expression of subversion -- subverting a law enacted by the representatives of the people.

I am not so much troubled by the constitutionality of a blanket moratorium. The constitution says the president may grant pardons. If she has the power to grant pardon to whomever catches her fancy; she has the power to grant it to all. Picking up the phone each time she wants to commute a sentence may be more appropriate but it is tedious and would constitute bad policy.

What is far more troubling is GMA's decision to enforce the death penalty only to kidnappers and not to the other convicts guilty of heinous crime. In GMA's previous blanket moratorium, there were no aggrieved parties among the convicts. Everybody, I presume, was happy to be spared the execution. In her selective policy of death penalty only to kidnappers, I can hear the grumbling of the kidnappers who may think they are not being treated equally by law and are being especially persecuted.

Such a selective enforcement of the death penalty may constitute, in my opinion, a denial of equal protection of laws. There is a denial of equal protection of the laws where persons subject to legislation are not treated alike, under like circumstances and conditions, both in privileges conferred and liabilities imposed ( Toledo v Dones, December 7,1973). By selectively imposing on the kidnappers the death penalty, the president may be, in effect, imposing upon them special liabilities.