Over due process

For someone who echoes the general lament about the slow grind of justice in our country, President Benigno “Noy” Aquino III seemed to be missing the point. President Aquino recently blamed the slow dispensation of justice in the Philippines as one of the reasons for the perceived impunity of killings of Filipino journalists.

President Aquino was confronted about the unchecked rise of media killings in the Philippines by one of the American journalists who flew here for the official visit of United States President Barack Obama. This was during the joint press conference at Malacañang last April 28 on the last leg of President Obama’s four-nation East Asia visits.

President Aquino was being made to explain the unsolved cases of 26 Filipino journalists who have been killed in the past three and a half years of his administration.

A few days later, another Filipino journalist was murdered.

A radio block-timer Richard Nadjid, in Bongao, Tawi-Tawi was gunned down last May 4. As of this writing, the killing of Nadjid, 35, married and a father of five children, remains unsolved. Ironically, his killing came just a day after the observance of UNESCO World Press Freedom Day.

Apparently blindsided that such question would crop up in that joint press briefing at the Palace, President Aquino noted there were several cases of murdered Filipino journalists already solved with the capture of the suspected killers. The other cases of media killings are in various stages in the police investigation, or being prosecuted, or undergoing trial in different regional trial courts in the country.

P-Noy tried to point out though not all of the reported media killings in the Philippines were related to their profession as journalist, which is true. But that is beside the point. One murder is one murder too many.

At the end of his long-winded response to the question, President Aquino capped it by ultimately pinning the blame on the notoriously slow grind of justice in the country.

The entire criminal justice system is not about just the courts. The judiciary is just one of five pillars of the criminal justice system. The four others are, namely, law enforcement, prosecution, the penal system, and the citizenry. Any weakest link of any of the five pillars is therefore the weakness of the structure of the entire criminal justice.

A further analogy would be using the phrase “the wheels of justice turn exceedingly slow.” Then, they are the five cogs that turn the wheels of justice.

I gathered the Supreme Court (SC) quietly has recently taken a direct hand on the matter. It should not be surprising especially if no less than the President publicly declared the guilt of the country’s justice system for being slow.

The cases of the 27 slain journalists do not necessarily require special courts, given the many other pending and backlog of unsolved killings all over the country. Here, we are just talking about 27 murder cases. What about the cases of the rest of ordinary people?

Speaking of special courts, certain quarters are raising such proposal to create special courts to handle all pork-barrel scam cases. The proposal was revived following the latest turnaround of businesswoman Janet Lim-Napoles to spill the beans on quite a number of incumbent and former lawmakers as recipients of “commissions” or kickbacks from their respective pork-barrel allocations.

Initially, only Senators Juan Ponce Enrile, Jinggoy Estrada and Ramon “Bong” Revilla Jr. were the first to be charged before the Ombudsman with plunder along with Napoles and five former congressmen and 29 other government officials and private individuals.

They were the first batch of accused in the pork-barrel scam cases filed last October by the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the National Bureau of Investigation (NBI). It was only last April when they were formally charged by the Ombudsman before the Sandiganbayan for plunder and graft cases.

Napoles last week decided to talk and implicated more lawmakers as allegedly having received multi-million peso kickbacks out of their annual budgetary allocations of Priority Development Assistance Fund (PDAF). In her sworn affidavit submitted to DOJ Secretary Leila de Lima, Napoles admitted and narrated how she got the lawmakers to endorse their PDAF-funded projects through her “bogus” non-governmental organizations (NGOs).

Summoned by the Senate Blue Ribbon Committee, De Lima submitted her copy of the so-called Napoles list, consisting of eight more senators, two of whom were former senators; and 69 incumbent and former congressmen. Immediately after, lawyers of Napoles formally requested the DOJ to allow their client to turn state witness.

That’s the catch why Napoles is now singing like a canary. The DOJ-NBI cases were largely based on the testimonies of Napoles’s cousin Benhur Luy and his fellow whistleblowers on the PDAF scam against all the accused.  Napoles may still have something up her sleeve that emboldened her to turn state witness. In fact, her sworn affidavits are still with De Lima. The DOJ Secretary asked the Senate Blue Ribbon Committee to give her more time before she submits to them the sworn affidavits of Napoles.

Whether the testimony of Napoles would make the government cases stronger and airtight against all the accused is something for the court to ultimately decide.

Ombudsman Conchita Carpio Morales who left for the United States on official trip last Saturday admitted it may take time before they would be able to resolve the so many issues and motions for reconsideration filed by all the accused. Some of them like Senators Enrile, Estrada and Revilla have elevated the matter to the SC.

I dread to think about how our justice system would be practically smothered by these cases with all the legal maneuvers available to lawyers who would surely use them.

And how about those innocent ones who were unjustly linked to these PDAF cases? How soon can their name and honor be cleared? A balm of clear conscience, they say, can give them comfort during these trying times.

One of the popular clichés is that everyone, including the accused, is entitled to due process.

But at the rate the wheels of justice turn here as President Aquino rued, it would not be far-fetched this would be a long overdue process.