Resolved DOJ petitions for review up in 2019

MANILA, Philippines — The number of resolved petitions for review under the Department of Justice significantly increased by more than 300 percent in 2019 compared to those in previous years, DOJ officials said yesterday.

DOJ Assistant Secretary Neal Bainto said they have resolved around 2,350 petitions for review as of Dec. 15 last year, which is 1,794 or 323 percent higher than the 556 resolved petitions in 2018.

Bainto added that the DOJ also resolved 1,727 petitions for review in 2017, which can be partly attributed to its “decongestion project” more than a year after the petition for review system was instituted in 2016.

The DOJ project was launched last August.

From 2017 to 2019, Bainto said the DOJ resolved a total of 4,633 petitions for review, which is already a big number, out of around 13,000 to 14,000 petitions for review filed before them.

The petitions for review are filed before the office of the justice secretary, which aims to appeal the rulings of prosecutors made on cases that were either dismissed or approved for filing of charges in courts due to findings of probable cause.

For DOJ spokesman and Undersecretary Markk Perete, the backlog of cases filed before them was part of the problems they have inherited from previous administrations.

“And a lot of those cases are ‘dismissable’ on the ground that the courts have already decided on these cases,” Perete said.

Under the decongestion project, Perete said the petitions for review would have to undergo two processes: first is the raffling off of cases to a group of prosecutors and the evaluation of the cases before they are sent back to a group of prosecutors for review.

Perete explained that the process aims to ensure that the undersecretaries and assistant secretaries of the DOJ would know who drafted the review, who made the evaluation and who drafted the resolution.

He said the prosecutors are also consulting the lower courts that handled the case “to find out the status of those cases” before coming up with the resolution on the petitions for review.