Outside in: the effects of president Duterte‟s endorsement of the death penalty on the opinions of the members of the Philippine bar.

Abstract

In a democratic society, the people‟s will is sovereign. In the Philippines, the new President Duterte wants to revive the death penalty. Is the re-instatement of capital punishment reflective of the people's desires? What do people think about the death penalty? How were they able to arrive at their positions? What influenced them? Relying primarily on participant interviews and essay-type questionnaires, this paper will not study whether people, specifically lawyers, support or oppose the death penalty, but rather, why – believing that a deeper understanding of what they think and feel is crucial for making a death penalty policy suited for the people. Lawyers have been chosen as the participants in this study not because of their intellectual capabilities but because of the exposure to various crimes that they get due to the nature of their occupation.