killing ever be justified?
Those who condemn extrajudicial killings and summary executions often beg the question of whether the end can ever justify the means. They would ignite fear of a government led by autocrats and dictators who are out to sow terror among the people. They would conjure images of innocent people who are tortured and physically abused, then killed and dumped being wrapped in masking tapes or whatever, and left in garbage bins, esteros and canals. In other words, they assume that the killers are savages who have no basic respect for life and the victims' right to live.
But how about a poor laborer of a father, whose innocent daughter was raped and physically abused by a gang of rich men's sons? Shades of John Grisham's masterpiece “A Time to Kill”? How about the late Mang Lauro Visconde who was an OFW and whose daughter was raped and murdered, together with his wife and other daughter – three loved ones, the only three reasons for his struggles and sacrifices – who were all killed in a gruesome rape with multiple homicides inside their humble home in our neighborhood in BF Homes Parañaque? Didn't have Mang Lauro a right to kill? Judge Amelita Tolentino convicted them but did not order the rapist killed for the simple reason that death penalty was abolished by President Cory Aquino.
How about the father and brother of Maggie de la Riva, who was also raped in the sixties? Didn’t they have a right to kill? Maggie was a young, innocent and ravishing beauty less than 20 years old. She just finished her taping in ABS-CBN in Quezon City at dawn and that gang of five spoiled brats, scions of the rich and famous, waited for Maggie and kidnapped her, detained her and raped her inside a motel in Pasay City. Judge Lourdes Paredes-San Diego, after trial and all due process, ordered the five men killed. Death penalty was still allowed at that time. In the same vein, the only reason why Judge Harriet Demetrio did not order that then mayor Sanchez of Calauan, Laguna killed was because death penalty was no longer allowed then.
President Marcos ordered a Chinese drug lord killed by firing squad in Luneta viewed by the whole nation via national TV. It was an effective deterrent against heinous crime. Drug was never a problem under President Marcos. But after President Cory abolished death penalty, and all the presidents following her did not focus on the drug menace, now we have a national cancer destroying the whole nation. Those who call themselves human rights advocates have no solutions to the drug cancer, to the crimes of murders, rapes, robberies, arsons, kidnappings perpetrated by addicts. They want to spare the lives of addicts while standing idly when the innocent are being slaughtered and ravished by savages under the power of drugs. Do the victims have no human rights? Are human rights only for the evil ones? Let them answer these simple questions or forever keep their peace.
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