Extrajudicial Versus Judicial Killings

By: Joe Mauricio

 

Capital punishment, also known as death penalty, is a government-sanctioned practice whereby a person is put to death as punishment for crime committed.

An extrajudicial killing is the killing of a person by government authorities without sanction of any judicial proceedings or legal process. Extrajudicial punishment is mostly seen by humanity to be unethical, since they bypass the process of legal jurisdiction in which they occur.

Summary execution is an execution in which a person is accused of a crime, and immediately killed without a full and fair trial.

The Republic of the Philippines should be far from commending for its dedication to continuing the death penalty.

Death penalty is a judicial killing. China, Iran, Korea, and beleve it or not, the U.S., are countries that carry out the most executions, bucking down global travels toward abolition of death penalty.

China, a friendly country for the Philippines, was by far the world’s most prolific executioner in putting to death thousands, according to Amnesty International. AI did not provide exact figures but challenged the Chinese authority to publish figures for the number of people sentenced to death. Methods of execution included beheading, electrocution, hanging, lethat injection or firing squad.

Amnesty International expressed particular alarm that significant proportion of executions or death sentences are drug-related.

Meanwhile, Muslim countries ignore International Amnesty and impose death penalty in their system of law..

Any country that continues to execute is flying in the face of the fact that both human rights law and U.N. human rights bodies consistently hold that abolition should be objective.

The Philippines has one heck of an opportunity as the country is trying to pass the death penalty law, while judicial killing is in effect without congressional approval.

For many, taking another life is the definition of murder. Holding death penalty implies not valuing human life. Someone commits a homicide, and then the country kills the perpetrator. Now, we have two people whose lives have been taken, two familiar lost loved ones.

Two wrongs don’t make it right. Two deaths won’t bring back the deceased.We’ve got to stop looking at our criminal system as a form of vengeance. What are we accomplishing by killing people and calling it justice?

In major countries that retain the death penalty, drug offenders make up majority of those who are condemned to die.While it would certainly be ideal to abolish this death penalty for all crimes, a major incremental step would be to ensure international standards are followed vis-avis capital punishment for drug crimes.

It’s more than 60 years since the International Declaration of Human Rights made abolition a benchmark of civilized society.

The campaign to end judicial killings everywhere would gain immeasurably from final eradication in all of the world’s most privileged nations.