10 Surprising Facts about Death Penalty in the Philippines

1. The pre-Spanish Filipinos practiced it, albeit infrequently.

While not capital punishment in the sense that it was not rendered for the sake of the state, the pre-

Spanish Filipinos did practice the death penalty. However, they practiced it infrequently at best.

Death sentences were regularly commuted to fines, flogging, or slavery. Out of the three, slavery was

the most common form of commutation since the pre-Spanish Filipinos found it more practical to have

a slave work in their fields and lands.

And unlike what the proven hoax Code of Kalantiaw would like us to believe, the condemned were not

subjected to unusual and cruel punishments such as being eaten by ants or thrown in boiling water.

Instead, they were executed via the more-common methods of decapitation and hanging.
2. The Spanish also didn’t use it much either.

Another misconception about Spanish rule in the Philippines blown way out of proportion is the

implementation of the death penalty during their rule. While executions did indeed happen, they only

commonly occurred during rebellions and uprisings.

In cases of treason, rebellion, or any other crime which endangered Spanish sovereignty, the death

penalty was frequently employed to quell the disturbance.

In times of relative peace, however, the Spanish did not bother to employ capital punishment as much.

In fact, out of more than 1,700 murder convicts condemned to die from 1840 to 1885, the Spanish

only executed 46 of them—an evidence that they were far more concerned with maintaining their

authority on the natives than killing them off en masse.

In a twist, it was the Americans rather than the Spanish who enacted more laws (the Sedition,

Brigandage, and Flag Laws) mandating the death penalty as a means of suppressing dissent among

Filipinos.
3. The Philippines had a club of pro-death penalty judges.

During the periods when the death penalty still operated, there existed a group of judges who strongly

advocated capital punishment and who were only too eager to give out the death penalty. Known as

the Guillotine Club, the group was founded in 1995 by Quezon City judge Maximiano Asuncion for

judges who handed out death sentences.

By his reasoning, if criminals could form syndicates to sow fear among ordinary people, then law-

abiding citizens such as judges should be able to put up their own group to scare off criminals.

Asuncion himself was said to have given out seven death sentences during his career. In fact, it was

Asuncion who presided over the high-profile case involving Leo Echegaray whom he subsequently

sentenced to death.

In a twist of fate, Asuncion did not live to see the sentence carried out—he died of a heart attack two

years before Echegaray’s execution in 1999.

4. The Catholic Church was once pro-death penalty.

There used to be a time when the Catholic Church actively campaigned for the death penalty. During

the Philippine Revolution, Manila Archbishop Bernardino Nozaleda openly called for Filipino rebels to be

exterminated by “fire, sword, and wholesale executions.”

With his endorsement, Spanish authorities regularly conducted public executions of Filipino

revolutionaries. It can be said Nozaleda was also indirectly responsible for Jose Rizal’s death when he

orchestrated the ouster of the conciliatory Governor Ramon Blanco with the iron-fisted Camilo de

Polavieja. Nozaleda also several times attempted to change sides. With the Americans’ arrival, he first

appealed to Emilio Aguinaldo for a Spanish-Filipino alliance against what he viewed as a Protestant

threat. When the Americans were winning, he also approached them for an alliance but was rebuffed.

Ultimately, even his own people in Spain rejected him—the city of Valencia once denied him entry

following his appointment as its archbishop. He resigned shortly thereafter.

5. The Philippines had the world’s second-largest death row population among

democracies.

Outside of such states as China and countries in the Middle East, the Philippines—before it abolished

the death penalty in 2006—used to have the world’s second-largest population of death row prisoners,

pegged at an estimated 1,200 people.

According to Amnesty International, the commutation of those sentences by former President Gloria

Arroyo also gave the Philippines the record of having conducted the biggest number of commutations

in a single sitting anywhere in the world.

Of course, the democratic country with the largest death row population is none other than the United

States. Since 1995 until the present, its death row convicts have averaged 3,000 per year.
6. A governor nearly ended up in the electric chair.

In what would have arguably been one of the biggest upsets against a political dynasty, one governor

nearly met his end in the electric chair.

Rafael Lacson, the governor of Negros Occidental who ran the province like his own personal fiefdom

from 1949 to 1951, was sentenced to the electric chair in 1954. This was after being found guilty for

the murder of Moises Padilla, an opposition candidate who ran for mayor in the town of Magallon in

1951.

Even after being threatened and harassed, Padilla—a war veteran who had the backing of then-

Defense Secretary Ramon Magsaysay—continued his run. Even though his candidate won the elections,

Lacson ordered the apprehension of Padilla ostensibly on the grounds of sedition and illegal possession

of firearms. A few days after his “arrest,” Padilla’s bloodied and bullet-riddled body was found in the

town plaza.

The brazenness of the murder spurred Magsaysay himself to personally go to Magallon to pick up

Padilla’s body and bring it to Manila for an autopsy and proper burial. In the end, however, Lacson’s
death penalty was reduced to life imprisonment due to the needed number of votes coming up short in

the Supreme Court.

7. We have executed a minor before.

With the uproar nowadays over the Pangilinan Law which critics say have essentially allowed minors to

commit crimes with impunity, a time occurred when the country really did—and could legally—execute

a minor since they were considered adults at the time.

In this case, the offender was none other than Marcial “Baby” Ama who was only 16 years old when he

was executed via electric chair. At the time, the law considered the legal age for men and women to be

16 and 14 respectively.

Ama himself earned his sentence after leading one of the biggest jail riots in history which resulted in

the deaths of nine inmates, one of them having been beheaded.

The Supreme Court imposed the death penalty after finding him guilty for stabbing to death a man

named Almario Bautista during the riot.

8. We nearly employed the gas chamber instead of lethal injection.

Were it not for the Americans’ refusal to give us one, we would have ended up using the gas

chamber—which is still legal in four US states by the way—instead of lethal injection.

When President Fidel Ramos brought back the death penalty with Republic Act 7659 in 1993, he

envisioned the gas chamber to replace the electric chair as stipulated in the third paragraph of Article

81 “as soon as facilities are provided by the Bureau of Prisons.”

However, the Americans—for one reason or another—rejected Ramos’ bid to purchase the necessary

materials from them, although they did successfully convince him to buy the equipment for lethal

injection instead. As a result, the law had to be changed again to provide for lethal injection as the

country’s method of execution.

9. Only the Philippines and the US have ever used the electric chair.

Believe it or not, only two countries in the world have ever used the electric chair—the United States

and the Philippines (in fact, it is still being used in certain US states today).

The Philippines adopted electrocution after the US brought in an electric chair in 1926. The country

continued to use the chair until 1976 when the firing squad replaced it as the preferred method of

execution.

In its 50-year career, the electric chair took the lives of 86 death row prisoners, among them the three

rapists of actress Maggie dela Riva, Baby Ama, and Manuel Roxas’ would-be assassin Julio Guillen.
10. A busy phone line led to a convict’s execution.

While the Philippines has had no incident of botched executions, it did have one instance where a busy

telephone line resulted in a convict’s execution before it could have been postponed.

Minutes before the scheduled execution of convicted rapist Eduardo Agbayani on January 25,

1999, President Joseph Estrada received a call from his spiritual adviser Bishop Teodoro Bacani telling

him Agbayani’s three daughters—his victims—were willing to forgive him. Estrada then tried calling

prison officials to stop the execution but only received fax tones and busy signals.

It was later discovered that Estrada did not know he was not using a direct line specially installed for

the very purpose of stopping an execution. When he did manage to connect at 3:12 PM, Agbayani was

unfortunately already dead at 3:11 PM—a mere difference of a single minute.

 What is Culture?

1. The arts and other manifestations of human intellectual achievement regarding collectively.

2. The customs, arts social institutions and achievements of a particular nation, people or other

social group.

3. Social behavior and norms found in human societies

4. It is considered a central concept in anthropology, encompassing the rage of phenomena that

are transmitted through social learning in human societies

 What is culture relativism?

It is the idea that a person’s belief, values and practices should be understood based on that

person’s own culture, rather than be judged against the criteria of another

 Ethics have a connection in culture relativism where in it have what we called ‘ethical relativism”

a theory that holds that morality is relative to the norms of one’s culture. That is whether an

action is right or wrong depends on the moral norms of the society in which it is practiced. The

only moral standards against which a society’s practices can be judge are its own.