Livestreaming executions
A new twist to capital punishment has emerged with United States President Donald Trump initially authorizing livestreaming (allowing the public to view) the execution of an American soldier, and then flip-flopping on that decision. (It remains unclear if the livestreaming can push through because such an execution requires authorization by the US president. The execution is scheduled for December).
This is the first public execution authorized in the US in 90 years to be carried out by gunfire.
Public opinion has been mixed, with considerable support for public executions as well as opposition. (Public opinion polls have not been conducted.)
I did feel it was a topic important for the Philippines, considering our history of abolishing and restoring the death penalty. There have been no debates on whether executions should be public or not, but we have had long periods of public executions. During the Spanish occupation, the use of the garrote (a metal contraption used to strangle the convict) was the norm for decades, with executions conducted in public places like Luneta. This included the Gomburza priests in 1871. There was Jose Rizal, executed by firing squad in Bagumbayan field in Luneta in 1896.
The debates over public executions—in the Philippines and elsewhere—revolve around the assertion that these are barbaric spectacles. Yet, those in favor of public executions argue that it is necessary to let people watch the executions, whether by hanging, firing squad, garrote, or beheading. And while many Christians are particularly vocal against these public spectacles, we forget that many of the Christian-sanctioned executions for heresy were open to the public, bloody, and cheered on lustily by crowds. I remember a book of saints gifted to me by one of my ninong/ninang couples, with many of the martyrs noted as having been executed by “hdq,” hanged, drawn, and quartered. Go figure the horror involved.
The basic rationale for the public executions was “deterrence.” Let the public see for themselves what fate awaited those who dared to violate the law.
This was certainly the case in 1973, shortly after martial law was declared in the Philippines. On Jan. 15 that year, a Chinese national, Lim Seng (Gan Suo So), was paraded out of his cell shortly after dawn, in Fort Bonifacio, to face a firing squad. The execution took only a few minutes—some accounts speculate that Lim Seng did not quite understand what was going on, hoping throughout the trial and the pre-execution period that he would be saved from the firing squad at the last minute.
Some 5,000 people were able to get into the execution grounds in Fort Bonifacio, with others ending up in waiting lines.
Lim Seng was an “entrepreneur” (dabbling in anything, it seems, that brought in money). It seems he could hardly speak English or Filipino (it seems there were no Chinese interpreters). He operated a printing press as a front, producing and selling heroin, and his markets were Thailand, Singapore, and the US (soldiers in particular, with the Vietnam War raging on).
Who knows what public opinion was at that time? But we do have recent posts from December 2025, i.e., showing that people are still reacting to the execution, and it seems people favor bringing back the executions (we don’t know if public or not).
The more recent Duterte era is hardly mentioned; people just seem to want to believe a new war on drugs will be effective. Never mind that all those years of bloodshed have done nothing. And I say that with emphasis, seeing that the addiction continues, even the killings. Just recently, one of my dogs was vaped to death with kush (marijuana).
As a veterinarian, I’ve taken on the dual task of educating people, as part of my public advocacy, about problems surrounding vaping, including its use for tobacco and what it does for humans and animals. As a public health professor, I recognize that the challenges are more formidable; there are new chemical compounds being formulated, and you can’t fight them just with fear and public executions.
The reactions from 1973 seem to linger. Marcos, the elder, was quoted as saying after Lim Seng’s execution, “[Lim Seng] accounts for the ruination of so many innocent lives, including children of very tender age.”
I think of a cousin only a few months older than I was, who died shortly after Lim Seng was executed.
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