MANILA, Philippines — Sen. Ronald "Bato" Dela Rosa said that proponents of bills pushing for the reinstatement of the death penalty have numbers on their side within the Senate.
Speaking in a radio interview aired over dzMM TeleRadyo, Dela Rosa disclosed that seven of the 24 lawmakers in the higher chamber have authored 11 different versions of the death penalty bill.
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"Our chances are good because there are seven of us pushing for it. We know that other senators who are still 50-50 on it can still be convinced if we debate them on it. So we have a fighting chance," he was quoted as saying in Filipino.
"I really didn't have any other platform besides the death penalty [when I was running for senator.] The people voted me [into this position] by 19 million votes because of this platform," he also said.
Dela Rosa brought the proposition up once more in late December after news broke about the murders of a mother and her son in Paniqui, Tarlac.
The neophyte senator said then that having the death penalty reinstated would deter similar crimes, but asserted that there was no culture of impunity hounding the national police.
Conversations surrounding the controversial measure, abolished in 2006 under then-President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, have since been revitalized following the grisly killings.
Human rights watchdog Amnesty International has disputed the logic that the death penalty can deter crimes and make societies safer, based on documented evidence from across the world.
"Far from making society safer, the death penalty has been shown to have a brutalizing effect on society. State-sanctioned killing only serves to endorse the use of force and to continue the cycle of violence," the group said in a briefer on the death penalty, which claimed that the logic was a myth.
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But Dela Rosa saw things differently, pointing to what he claimed were the calls of Filipinos to reinstate the state-sanctioned penalty.
"There's a significant percentage of people who want the death penalty back," he said in Filipino, though he did not care to cite figures on this.
"These numbers increased, especially in today's situation after the Tarlac incident when the mother and son who could not even fight back were recklessly shot."
While Dela Rosa seems eager to institute death for criminals, he has also been careful to defend erring cops and the Philippine National Police as a whole after similarly controversial incidents.
— Franco Luna with a report from Christian Deiparine