THE senator who led the crackdown on foreign paedophiles last year has now filed a bill in the Senate seeking the death penalty for necrophilia.
Senator Ernesto Herrera said there was no existing legislation which covered necrophilia, leading to a situation where offenders could only be charged with minor offences like tampering with a cadaver.
He said necrophilia was a grisly and heinous act which should be subject to the maximum penalty, particularly if the crime involved more than one offender, or if an offender was in charge of the corpse at the time of the crime.
'The problem is that cases of necrophilia are rarely reported to the police, and the few cases that are do not get logged by the police since the act is beyond our justice system,' he said.
'Nonetheless, forcible violation of a woman's chastity, under any circumstances, is a detestable offence that deserves to be condemned by civilised society.' Senator Herrera said he was launching the bill in the wake of an incident in southern Mindanao where a man caught in the act of necrophilia went unpunished because there was no legislation to deal with it.
The victim's family had only managed to get the suspect charged with robbery because he had stolen some of the victim's valuables, he said.
