Death in the time of Covid-19: Efforts to restore the death penalty in the Philippines.

The Philippine Congress recently passed a bill amending the Dangerous Drugs Act of 2002 and reimposing the penalty of life imprisonment to death for specific-drug related offenses. House Bill No. 7814 also allows the presumption of guilt in certain drug-related crimes unless otherwise proven, thereby overturning the long-standing constitutional presumption of innocence. The bill has been sent to the Senate for its concurrence and could only be several steps away before being signed into law by President Rodrigo R. Duterte. This paper discusses the ramifications of the new bill and the questioned timeliness of its passage when the country continues to have a large and overcrowded prison population and a significant number of deaths due to SARS-CoV-2 in Southeast Asia. The government's lapses in following the 2021 national vaccination plan became apparent in the 31 March 2021 assessment made by the congressional health panel on the government's response to the pandemic. From the authors' perspective, the urgency of using the country's limited resources to help medical frontliners and local government units prevent further infections and save lives should have outweighed the efforts exerted to pass a law that legalized the death penalty for the third time in the Philippines.

Bringing the Science Back Into Forensic Science in Death Investigations in the Philippines during the COVID-19 Pandemic

After a pandemic-filled 2020 had finally come to an end, many were looking forward to a new year filled with renewed hope and fresh beginnings. Unfortunately for a 23-year old Filipina, the first day of the year would turn out to be her last day on earth. While a single individual's death on New Year's day would typically not be a newsworthy event in the Philippines, this particular case sparked a media frenzy. It exposed the flaws of a death investigation system still reeling from the many unsolved cases of extrajudicial killings brought about by the war on drugs [9]. To date, the Philippines does not have an independent, science-based medico-legal death investigation system (Go, 2021;Pastor, 2021). This commentary aims to provide a case narrative to highlight the urgency of adopting a systematic death investigation system, seek justice for the victim's family, reduce the possibilities of wrongful accusations and convictions, and maximize the use of limited and costly forensic resources in the Philippines.