First to Let Go

On June 24, 2006, the Philippines stopped running that reflex. President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo signed Republic Act 9346, and a predominantly Catholic nation abolished capital punishment. Two months earlier, the sentences of 1,230 death-row inmates had been commuted in a single stroke — what Amnesty International called the largest commutation of death sentences in history. The largest letting-go on record.

This wasn't a country with no appetite for the punishment. The Philippines had abolished the death penalty once before — its 1987 constitution made it the first nation in Asia to do so — then reinstated it under Ramos in 1993, then executed people under Estrada until 2000. This was a place that had felt the pull, given in to it, and then — uncomfortably, against regional gravity — decided to stop a second time.

That's the part worth sitting with. Letting go is harder than retaliating, and not for the reasons we tell ourselves. Retaliation feels like control. When you return the blow, you get to believe you're doing something — that you've taken the disorder of a crime and forced it back into order. Mercy offers no such hit. To abolish execution is to stand in front of the worst thing a person can do and admit out loud: killing them will not bring anyone back. The symmetry was always an illusion. The scales were never going to level.

So we build the machinery instead — the gurney, the appeals, the witnesses behind glass — because the machinery lets us perform a restoration of order we can't actually achieve. It's a ritual that converts grief into procedure. It feels like resolution. It is mostly choreography.

What's harder than abolishing is going back. A country that has never executed can claim it simply lacks the appetite. The Philippines couldn't say that. It had let this weapon go in 1987, picked it back up, and used it — felt the pull, gave in, resumed executions until 2000. So in 2006 it wasn't an innocent deciding it didn't want a thing it had never tasted. It was a system that knew exactly what dropping the weapon would cost, because it had held the weapon, and dropped it anyway. There's a specific discomfort in disarming yourself with full information. You can't prove the room gets safer. You only know you stopped adding to it.

What coherenceism notices here is structural — and it's the same pattern at two scales. A person mastering the urge to hit back and a state dismantling its gallows aren't a metaphor for each other; they're one move nested at different sizes, force declining to answer force. A country, of course, has no spinal cord — the "reflex" I keep naming actually runs through Arroyo, a Church-aligned coalition, a legislature, not one startled body. But the shape is identical: don't add a counterweight to the violence in the system, remove a source of distortion. Force answering force never settles a field — it just keeps the wave moving. The Philippines did the thing that's almost impossible for a frightened system to do: it let the wave die down instead of striking the bowl again.

Then it did something even harder — it bound its own future hands. In 2007 it ratified the Second Optional Protocol to the ICCPR, locking abolition in by treaty, because it knew its own future self might reach for the reflex again. A Ulysses pact against its own fear: tie yourself to the mast now, while you're clear-eyed, so the next wave of panic can't steer. It has been tempted. Bills to reinstate have come, and so far, gone.

You already know the death penalty doesn't heal what it claims to heal. Most people who support it know it too, somewhere under the argument. The Philippines just did the unbearable thing: it acted on the knowing instead of the reflex — and then, not trusting itself, bound its hands so the reflex couldn't win next time. Matching violence with violence was never the same as setting things right. It was only ever the same as feeling, for a moment, like you had.