Death Penalty Case of Leo Echegaray PDF

Death Penalty to Leo Echegaray On February 5, 1999 at 3:19 pm, after eating his last meal of prawns, bulalo (beef stew) and grilled fish, Leo Echegaray died by lethal injection at the New Bilibid Prison, Muntinlupa. It was five years ago or on 1994 when Echegary raped Rodessa, his 10-year old step...

Death Penalty to Leo Echegaray On February 5, 1999 at 3:19 pm, after eating his last meal of prawns, bulalo (beef stew) and grilled fish, Leo Echegaray died by lethal injection at the New Bilibid Prison, Muntinlupa. It was five years ago or on 1994 when Echegary raped Rodessa, his 10-year old step-daughter, inside their own home while her mother and her siblings were away. It was disclosed during the trial that he raped Rodessa four separate times thereafter, a bestiality he managed to do by threatening Roddessa that he would kill her mother if she would divulge what happened. Rodessa eventually found courage to tell her grandmother about what was happening to her. He grandmother in turn told Rodessa’s mother about it. Subsequent events led to Echegaray’s arrest and conviction. Despite the finding by the trial court and later by the Supreme Court of Echegary’s guilt beyond reasonable doubt to the crime of qualified rape which is punishable by death, the latter continued to profess his innocence. He even filed before the Supreme Court a motion to reconsider the verdict against him and questioned the constitutionality of the Death Penalty Law under which he was meted the punishment of death. He claimed that the law was unconstitutional for death penalty is a “cruel, excessive and inhuman punishment.” The Court rejected this morally-charged assertion against death penalty. It held that “punishments are cruel when they involve torture or a lingering death, but the punishment of death is not cruel, within the meaning of that word as used in the constitution. It implies there something inhuman and barbarous, something more than the mere extinguishment of life” (People v. Echegaray, 1997). Those who sought the abolition of death penalty, however, aside from questioning its morality, challenged its usefulness in deterring crimes. They claimed that these is no evidence that death penalty or capital punishment deterred deadly criminals. They further argued that no crime, however heinous, would ever justify the institutional taking of a human life. Leo Echegaray was the first convict to die of death penalty after it was abolished in 1987 and re-imposed in December 1993. Out of the growing criticisms against its utility and morality, Congress passed in 2007 the Republic Act No. 9346 which prohibited the imposition of death penalty in the Philippines and consequently repealed the Death Penalty Law. President Rodrigo Duterte calls to revive death penalty by lethal injection, especially for drug-offenders. Human rights advocates fear that adopting death penalty “will mean spilling more blood in the name of Duterte’s ‘drug war.’ It will lead the Philippines to descend further into a rights-violating abyss” (Conde, 2020). Should capital punishment be reintroduced in the Philippines? Is it a morally appropriate form of punishment? Excerpt from Social Ethics: Morality and Social Policy (1997) by Mappes & Zembaty: Death Penalty In any discussion of the morality of the death penalty, it is important to remember that the death penalty is a kind of punishment. Indeed, it is normally thought to be the most serious kind of punishment, hence it is called capital punishment. Most philosophers agree that punishment in general (as contrasted with capital punishment in particular) is a morally justified social practice. For one thing, however uneasy we might feel about inflicting harm on another person, it is hard to visualize a complex society managing to survive without an established legal system of punishment. However, to say that most philosophers agree that punishment is a morally justified social practice is not to say that there are no dissenters from this view. Some argue that it is possible to structure society in ways that would not necessitate commitment to a legal punishment as we know it. One possibility suggested is that undesirable social behavior could be adequately kept in check by therapeutic treatment rather than by traditional kinds of punishment. Such a system would seem to have an advantage of being more humane, but surely it is implausible to believe that present therapeutic techniques are anywhere near adequate to the task. In many countries, there is a widespread agreement on the moral defensibility of punishment as an overall social practice. Those in favor of retaining the death penalty are common called retentionists. Retentionists differ among themselves regarding the kinds of cases in which they find it appropriate to employ the death penalty. They also differ among themselves regarding the supporting arguments they find acceptable. But anyone who supports the retention of death penalty – for employment in whatever kinds of cases and for whatever reason – is by definition a retentionist. Those in favor of abolishing the death penalty are commonly called abolitionists. Abolitionists, by definition, refuse to support any employment of the death penalty. Like the retentionists, however, they differ among themselves concerning the supporting arguments they find acceptable. There is one extreme abolitionist line of thought. It is based on the belief that the sanctity of human life demands absolute non-violence. On this view, killing of any kind, for whatever reason, is always and everywhere morally wrong. No one has the right to take a human life, not in self-defense, not in war, not in any circumstance. Thus, since the death penalty obviously involves a kind of killing, it is a morally unacceptable form of punishment and must be abolished. The defender of absolute non-violence is sometimes inclined to argue that violence will only breed violence. There may indeed by much truth in this claim. Still, most people do not believe that such a claim provides adequate support for the contention that all killing is morally wrong, and if some killing is morally acceptable, perhaps the death penalty is as well. What arguments can be made in its behalf? Retentionist Arguments Broadly speaking, arguments for the retention of the death penalty usually emphasize either (1) considerations of justice or (2) considerations of social utility. Those who emphasize considerations of justice typically develop their case along the following line: When the moral order is upset by the commission of some offense, it is only right that the disorder be rectified by punishment that is equal to or proportional to the offense. This view is reflected in remarks such as “The scales of justice demand retribution” and “The offender must pay for the crime.” Along this line, the philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) is famous for his unequivocal defense of the lex talionis – the law of retaliation, often expressed as “an eye for an eye.” According to this principle, punishment is to be inflicted in a measure that will equalize the offense. And when the offense is murder, only capital punishment is sufficient to equalize it. Although the demand for retribution continues to play a prominent role in the overall case for the death penalty, many retentionists have come to feel quite uneasy with the notion of imposing the death penalty “because the wrongdoer deserves it.” Perhaps this uneasiness can be traced, at least in part, to our growing awareness of the way in which social conditions seem to spawn criminal activity. If so, then it seems that we have arrived at a point of intersection between a venerable – and vexing – philosophical problem, the problem of “freedom and determinism.” Pure retributive thinking seems to presuppose a radical sense of human freedom and its correlate, a radical sense of personal responsibility and accountability for one’s actions. This is undoubtedly why retentionists who espouse a retributive rationale often insist that the death penalty does not constitute a denial of the wrongdoer’s dignity and worth as a human being. On the contrary, they say, the death penalty reaffirms the dignity and worth of a convicted murderer – by holding the person strictly responsible for the crime that has been committed and giving the person what he or she deserves. Of course, if someone is uneasy with the radical sense of human freedom that seems to underlie pure retributive thinking, that person will surely be uneasy with the retributive rationale for retention of the death penalty. So let us turn our attention to the utilitarian side of the retentionist coin. Since considerations of social utility are commonly advanced in defense of the practice of punishment in general, it is not surprising to find that they are also commonly advanced in defense of retaining the death penalty. Utilitarianism, as a distinct school of moral philosophy, locates the primary justification of punishment in its social utility. Utilitarians acknowledge that punishment consists in the infliction of evil on another person, but they hold that such evil is far outweighed by the future benefits that will accrue to society. Imprisonment, for example, might lead to such socially desirable effects as (1) rehabilitation of the criminal, (2) incapacitation, whereby we achieve temporary or permanent protection from the imprisoned criminal, and (3) deterrence of other potential criminals. When utilitarian considerations are recruited in support of the retention of the death penalty, it is clear that the rehabilitation of the criminal can play no part in the case. But retentionists do frequently promote considerations of incapacitation and deterrence. Retentionists who appeal to considerations of incapacitation typically argue that the death penalty is the only effective way to protect society from a certain subset of convicted murderers – namely, those who are at once violence-prone and irreformable. Life imprisonment, it is said, cannot assure society of the need protection, because even if “life imprisonment” were really life imprisonment – that is, even if a sentence of life imprisonment excluded the possibility of parole – violence-prone and irreformable inmates would still pose an imminent threat to prison guards and fellow inmates. Furthermore, escape is always possible. Thus, the death penalty is the only truly effective way of achieving societal protection against the continuing threat posed by some convicted murderers. According to many retentionists, however, the fundamental justification for retaining the death penalty lies in the fact that the death penalty is a uniquely effective deterrent. But is this central claim true? Is the death penalty a more substantial deterrent than life imprisonment or even long-term imprisonment? At this point, a natural move is to look to the findings of the social sciences, but most scholars familiar with the social science literature on this issue would say that the available evidence is conflicting and ultimately inconclusive. If it is true that empirical studies have failed to resolve the central factual question, what else can be said about the deterrence rationale for the death penalty? Many retentionists, willing to acknowledge that scientific findings are inconclusive, argue that we must simply rely on common sense. Since people typically fear death much more than they fear life imprisonment, it just stands to reason, they say, that the death penalty is superior to life imprisonment as a deterrent. Although the threat of life imprisonment or even long-term imprisonment may well be sufficient to deter many would-be murderers, the threat of execution would deter an even greater number. Thus the death penalty ought to be retained in our system of criminal justice because it is a more substantial deterrent than is life imprisonment. The common-sense argument for the death penalty as a uniquely effective deterrent might be countered with the following claim: It does not follow from the mere fact that one punishment is more severe than the another that the former will be a more substantial deterrent than the latter. Indeed, it might be the case that anyone capable of being deterred from murder by the threat of the death penalty would be equally well deterred by the threat of life imprisonment. There is one other important argument made by retentionists dedicated to the deterrence rationale. This argument takes uncertainty – our uncertainty whether or not the death penalty is a uniquely effective deterrent – as its point of departure. If we retain the death penalty, the argument goes, we run the risk of needlessly eradicating the lives of convicted murderers; perhaps the death penalty is not a uniquely effective deterrent. On the other hand, if we abolish the death penalty, we run the risk of innocent people becoming future murder victims; perhaps the death penalty is a uniquely effective deterrent. Faced with such uncertainty, the argument concludes, it is our moral obligation to retain the death penalty. Whichever we may go, there is a risk to be run, but it is better from a moral point of view to risk the lives of the guilty than to risk the lives of the innocent. A critic might respond to this argument as follows. In claiming that retention risks the lives of the guilty, whereas abolition risks the lives of the innocent, the argument overlooks the possibility that retention of the death penalty has what is sometimes called “counter-deterrent effect.” The idea here is that state- sponsored killing in the form of execution has a brutalizing effect on society, that it actually functions to weaken inhibitions on the part of the populace against killing. Thus, in the long run, there might well be more murders in a retentionist society than there would be in an abolitionist society. So it is not correct to say that retention of the death penalty risks only guilty lives; relative to the possibility that the death penalty has a counter-deterrent effect, retention also places innocent lives at risk. Abolitionist Arguments What can be said of the abolitionist case against the death penalty? Most abolitionists do not care to argue the extreme position, already discussed, of absolute non-violence, yet they typically do not want to commit themselves seriously to the “sanctity of human life.” They emphasize the inherent worth and dignity of each individual and insist that the taking of a human life, while perhaps sometimes morally permissible, is a very serious matter and not to be permitted in the absence of weighty overriding reasons. At face value, they argue, the death penalty is cruel and inhumane; and since retentionists have failed to advance substantial reasons in its defense, it must be judged a morally unacceptable practice. Against retentionist arguments based on retribution as a demand of justice, abolitionists frequently argue that the “demand of justice” is nothing but a mask for a barbarous vengeance. Against retentionist arguments based on considerations of social utility, abolitionists simply argue that other more human punishments will serve equally well. We do not need the death penalty to incapacitate convicted murderers because life imprisonment can provide us with a sufficient measure of societal protection. Also, since there is no reason to believe that the death penalty is a more effective deterrent than long-term imprisonment, retention cannot be justified on the basis of considerations of deterrence. In addition to advancing arguments that directly counter retentionist claims, abolitionists typically incorporate two further arguments into their overall case against the death penalty. The first of these arguments can be stated as follows: It is impossible to guarantee that mistakes will not be made in the administration of punishment, but this factor is especially important in the case of the death penalty, because only capital punishment is irrevocable. Thus only the death penalty eradicates the possibility of compensating an innocent person who has been wrongly punished. A second abolitionist argument focuses attention on patterns of discrimination in the administration of the death penalty. In our society, it is said, the poor and uneducated are more likely to receive death penalty than the affluent and educated.