A 17-year-old girl sentenced when she was 14 is one...

A 17-year-old girl sentenced when she was 14 is one of 1,020 people who face lethal injection following the Government's decision to resume executing death-row convicts.
To opponents of capital punishment, the girl's case says a lot about the country's justice system.
"It's really awful, really backward and underdeveloped," said Socorro Diokno, secretary-general of the Free Legal Assistance Group (Flag).
The girl was convicted of being part of a kidnap gang by a judge who disregarded evidence showing her age. Philippine law forbids sentencing anyone younger than 18 to death.
President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo recently announced her Government would expedite the execution of 95 convicted kidnappers in response to a growing tide of crime.
Diokno said the decision looks like "it might be pandering to an influential and rich part of society".
She said Flag's own studies of police statistics showed executions had had no effect on crime. "Most of the executions under [former President Joseph] Estrada were of rapists, but qualified rape has been increasing and this despite the fact that you have a couple of hundred people convicted of rape on death row," she said.
Diokno also noted that since 1995, two-thirds of death sentences brought for review to the Supreme Court were set aside because of mistakes, procedural errors or because the accused turned out to be innocent. "The justice system is so fallible, you could have instances of persons being falsely sentenced to death," she said.
The President's about-face could lead to her parting ways with the Catholic Church, which was instrumental in mobilising Filipinos to oust Estrada and back Arroyo. The Catholic Bishops' Conference of the Philippines criticised her decision.
"We're appealing to the President to reconsider; we don't want lives to be wasted because of the illusion that execution deters crime," said Rodolfo Diamante, executive secretary of the bishops' Episcopal Commission on Prison Pastoral Care.
Because the death-penalty law had not actually been abolished, courts under Mrs Arroyo's administration have not stopped handing out death sentences.
According to the bishops' prison commission, of the 1,020 death-row convicts, 27 are females, seven are senior citizens, seven are minors and 15 are foreigners.