Dela Rosa pushes death penalty for police officers who commit murder

A mother and her son lay dead in Paniqui, Tarlac, shot by a neighbor who happened to wear a badge. The off-duty police officer, Jonel Nuezca, killed Sonia and Frank Anthony Gregorio—both unarmed—during an argument, and someone recorded it. The video circulated. By Wednesday, the incident had reached the Senate floor, where it became the catalyst for a proposal that would reshape how the Philippines thinks about capital punishment and police accountability.

Senator Ronald Dela Rosa seized on the moment. He had already filed Senate Bill No. 226, which would restore the death penalty for high-level drug traffickers—a centerpiece of President Rodrigo Duterte's campaign promises and a signature policy goal. But the Tarlac shooting changed the calculus. Dela Rosa told reporters he was now considering an amendment that would add murder committed by police officers to the list of capital crimes. The logic was straightforward: a person entrusted with a gun and a badge, wielding both against helpless civilians, deserved the ultimate punishment. He called the killing "cold-blooded" and suggested that such a provision might have deterred Nuezca himself.

The senator's reasoning revealed a tension that had long plagued death penalty debates in the Philippines. He had deliberately excluded ordinary murder from his original bill, fearing that poor defendants without resources to mount a vigorous legal defense would be disproportionately sentenced to death. That was justice denied, he believed. But a police officer was different—someone with training, authority, and the state's instruments of violence at their disposal. If anyone deserved capital punishment for murder, perhaps it was someone who had betrayed that trust so completely. During the upcoming hearings on death penalty legislation, Dela Rosa suggested, senators could debate whether to add this aggravating circumstance: the perpetrator wore a uniform.

He was not alone in pushing for capital punishment's return. Senate President Vicente Sotto III, along with Senators Christopher Go, Panfilo Lacson, Manny Pacquiao, Sherwin Gatchalian, Imee Marcos, and Ramon Revilla Jr., had all filed their own death penalty bills. The Philippines had abolished capital punishment in 1987, becoming the first Asian nation to do so. President Fidel Ramos brought it back in 1993 to combat rising crime, but President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo abolished it again in 2006. Now, under Duterte, the push for reinstatement had become a centerpiece of the administration's law-and-order agenda. The president had promised it during his campaign as a tool to deter crime and dismantle drug syndicates.

Yet despite these bills being submitted at the start of the 18th Congress, the Senate had not yet scheduled hearings. Dela Rosa expressed frustration at the delay. The Tarlac incident, he seemed to suggest, should accelerate the process. Whether it would remained unclear. What was certain was that a video of an off-duty officer shooting two unarmed neighbors had injected new urgency into a debate that had been stalled for months—and had given senators a concrete, visceral case to argue that some murders demanded the ultimate response.