Pacquiao’s push for death penalty unfazed by Vatican rejection

Despite Pope Francis’ pronouncement that the death penalty is “inadmissible” in all cases, Sen. Manny Pacquiao on Saturday said he would continue to pursue his advocacy on capital punishment.

“It’s not about us, what I think or what I want. It’s in the Bible and also in our Constitution, so there should be no problem,” said Pacquiao, who has been very vocal about his Christian beliefs.

“We will discuss it so it can be explained thoroughly and everybody can be enlightened about faith [and] about [the] government,” the senator said in an interview over dwIZ.

According to the boxing champ also known as “The Pacman,” the Bible allows the government to impose the death penalty on those who have committed heinous crimes. The death penalty is also in the Constitution, he added.

Christ as example

In January last year, Pacquiao cited the Bible to defend the death penalty and said that even Jesus Christ was sentenced to death because the government had imposed it.

When the Bible said “thou shall not kill,” the passage was referring to those who were sinned against, who may not take the law in their own hands in killing another, the senator said.

“Let the authority handle that. We’re talking about the law of the land, which is approved by God and instituted by God. The government is instituted by God,” Pacquiao said last year.

The senator said he would continue his subcommittee hearing on proposals to reimpose the death penalty on heinous crimes like drug trafficking, rape with murder, robbery with murder, and kidnap-for-ransom.

The pending bill could be made more acceptable to his colleagues in the Senate if the death penalty were imposed only on high-level drug traffickers, Pacquiao said.

Malacañang has been keen on pushing the reimposition of the death penalty, which was abolished in the country in 2006, amid concerns that the Philippines’ flawed justice system has resulted in the poor being disproportionately meted out capital punishment.

House bill passed

Although the House of Representatives passed a bill reviving the death penalty in March 2017, the bill has stalled at the committee level in the Senate.  Malacañang said it would try “gentle persuasion” with lawmakers to convince them to pass the bill.

Senate President Vicente Sotto III earlier said he would try to find a compromise to get his colleagues to back the measure, but an ally in President Duterte’s majority party, Sen. Aquilino Pimentel III, had categorically stated that the Senate “won’t reimpose it.”

In a radio interview also on Saturday, Sotto said that if the death penalty for drug traffickers would not get enough support, he would pursue his bill that sought to create a new penal institution for high-level drug convicts.

Sotto said he wanted an Alcatraz-style prison where big drug players would be isolated from other convicts and would have no access to communication with the outside world to prevent them from plying their trade behind bars.

Change in catechism

The Vatican on Thursday approved a change in the text of Catholic catechism that had previously accepted the death penalty “as a last recourse … to effectively defend human lives against the unjust aggressor.”

But the new Catholic text acknowledged that the “dignity of a person is not lost even after the commission of very serious crimes.”

The Pope has long opposed the death penalty, saying it is fundamentally against the teachings of Christ because it excludes the possibility of redemption, does not give justice to victims and feeds vengeance.