Two senators expressed alarm on Tuesday over President Duterte’s plan to execute five to six death convicts daily once capital punishment is restored.
Sen. Grace Poe said she was unsettled by the President’s pronouncements while Sen. Leila de Lima said Mr. Duterte was “on his way to delivering on his promise to exterminate the supposed three million addicts, which he already regards as subhumans anyway.”
In a television interview, Poe said that during the presidential campaign she said she favored death penalty for heinous crimes and repeat offenders, but she also wanted a reform of the judicial system since the poor were not adequately legally protected.
“And then you have the pronouncement of the President that he wants five to six kilings, five to six executions a day. That’s a little bit unsettling for me,” Poe said.
But before Congress tackles the reimposition of capital punishment, she said she wanted to look into the government’s plans for judicial reforms.
In text messages, De Lima said the Duterte administration’s “emerging program revolves around death and killing,” citing the alleged extrajudicial killings in the war on drugs as well as its bid to reimpose the death penalty.
De Lima, a former justice secretary and former chair of the Commission on Human Rights, was in the United States where she received recognition for “standing up to an extremist leader,” one of the 100 Global Thinkers who received citations from Foreign Policy magazine in Washington, DC.