Perez wants no execution while he’s on top of DOJ

Justice Secretary Hernando Perez is against the death penalty.

Perez told The STAR yesterday no death convict would be executed while he heads the Department of Justice, which supervises the Bureau of Corrections.

"I shall make the recommendation for communication of the death penalty to life imprisonment except in the most extreme cases," he said. "I shall do so while I am secretary of justice."

Perez said he would do "everything in his power" to recommend to President Arroyo a stop to any execution because he cannot grant executive clemencies to death convicts.

"Frankly I dread the thought of anyone being executed during my watch and so I recommended two death convicts for the commutation of sentence to life imprisonment," he added.

Perez said the two men Mrs. Arroyo saved from lethal injection — Edgar Maligaya and Rodrigo Calma — were respectively set to be put to death yesterday and on April 2.

Malacañang said yesterday Mrs. Arroyo had been informed that the Board of Pardons was reviewing the case of 17 other death row inmates for "possible commutation of their respective sentences."

But the statement said the Arroyo administration will honor the commitment of the Estrada administration to the Catholic Church that the government would commute the death sentences of convicts whose cases have been upheld by the Supreme Court.

Government authorities freed yesterday a second batch of jailed communist guerrillas as part of efforts to restart peace negotiations with the rebels.

Marie Enriquez, head of a political prisoners’ monitor group, told reporters yesterday a man and a woman, who were arrested six months ago on illegal weapons charges, were freed yesterday after the government withdrew the charges against them.

Enriquez said three other men convicted of murder – one of them jailed 11 years ago – were released from the National Penitentiary in Muntinlupa City yesterday.

Mrs. Arroyo has promised to free 73 New People’s Army and Moro Islamic Liberation Front rebels, she added. – Delon Porcalla