Message The Commission on Human Rights is pleased to present our research entitled, “In Defense of the Right to Life: Analyzing Factors Affecting Filipino About the Death Penalty.” This work is the accumulation of the efforts of the team within the Commission, our partners from the Social Weather Stations, and fellow advocates from all over the world. The reintroduction of the death penalty has been part of the current administration’s legislative agenda from the beginning of their term. The President has repeatedly mentioned this in his State of the Nation Addresses, most recently last July 2020, to fulfil his vow to end drugs and crime in the Philippines. This is despite our obligations under the 2nd Optional Protocol Aiming at the Abolition of the Death Penalty of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Supporters of the measure to reintroduce capital punishment have always touted that an overwhelming majority of Filipinos want the death penalty. We understand that public opinion indeed has influence on public policy, which is to be expected since we are a democratic society. However, we needed to be certain as to whether Filipinos truly supported the death penalty and explore the factors that affect this supposed overwhelming support. So we decided to be brave and faced the problem. We grappled with the question, why do majority of Filipinos want the death penalty? Inspired by my experience during the World Congress Against Death Penalty in Oslo two years ago, we moved to prove that the purveying overwhelming public opinion for death penalty was a myth. We embarked on the first ever comprehensive and dedicated survey on the death penalty and the results proved promising. This research study completes the initial results we released last 2018. Our survey was inspired by Dr. Mai Sato and Dr. Paul Bacon’s study about public opinion and the death penalty in Japan, where the iceberg model was used to analyze how the Japanese government conducts its surveys on the death penalty. The support for the death penalty is just the tip of the iceberg. Public opinion swings toward favoring the death penalty but as one goes beyond the tip of the iceberg, layers and masses of conditions and intentions abound, showing a yearning for an efficient, impartial justice and due process for all. As Dr. Sato and Dr. Bacon found, public opinion surveys were technically flawed and do not really accurately depict the attitudes of the public towards the death penalty. From this survey, the Commission learned about the Filipino’s opinion on death penalty. We gained insights on their views that when presented with facts about the death penalty, alternatives other than capital punishment, and its impact, an average of 7 of 10 will not choose the death penalty. We learned about what has shaped their opinion, who do they think they trust most in upholding human rights, and what was their preferred punishment for certain crimes. In determining these layers and masses of intentions and beliefs, underneath the surface, we set out to identify the major supporters of the death penalty, and why they would ii