Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, May 4) — Four new bills seeking to restore death penalty have been filed before the House of Representatives on Wednesday.
Under the bills filed by House Justice Committee Chairman Reynaldo Umali, rape, plunder, kidnapping, and treason are punishable by death.
These offenses were earlier excluded from House Bill 4727, which was passed by the House early this year. It proposes capital punishment but only for drug-related cases.
Read: Duterte on death penalty bill: Why was rape taken out?
The draft for House Bill 4727 underwent several amendments before House leadership could finally get the nod of the majority.
Read: House nods to restoration of Death Penalty on third and final reading
Umali said this time, his four bills will be tackled and passed one at a time to avoid a bottleneck.
He added even members of the supermajority would find it hard to reach a consensus if each bill involves penalizing two or more cases by death.
“For example, pag pinagsabay mo iyong plunder and rape, meron may ayaw ng rape, meron may ayaw ng plunder, bawas sa amin iyon (when you put together plunder and rape, some disagree with rape, some disagree with plunder, that’s a decrease in our number). So learning our lesson from 4727, we agreed na individual na lang namin itatackle iyan (to tackle these individually),” Umali said.
“It will take time but hopefully we can pass [these] also,” the representative of the 2nd district of Oriental Mindoro said.
However, Umali said the death penalty bills will have to take a backseat for now to give way to the discussion of the impeachment complaint against President Rodrigo Duterte, which his committee hopes to finish within May.
Congress will take a break from June 3 to July 23, but Umali hopes to start discussing death penalty bills when the Senate resumes session by the end of July.
“Sinabi na ni Majority kahapon, ni Congressman Fariñas na back-burner muna itong mga death penalty so baka hindi niya irefer sa amin (Majority Leader Rodolfo Fariñas already said yesterday that the death penalty bills will be in the back-burner so he might not refer these to our committee) so we cannot move in the meanwhile,” Umali said.
