State of impunity
The Cebu City police missed the point when its chief told the media that lawyers who experienced “extortion attempts” by an anonymous caller should have gone to the police first before posting the caller’s number on social media.
The same number registered as a miscall on my mobile phone Tuesday last week. But as I usually do with anonymous phone numbers, I didn’t take or return the call. It was only later that evening after reading fellow lawyer Kim Grace Mendoza’s post on social media that I realized I got the same call.
Knowing attorneys Kim and Magdalena “Daymeg” Lepiten (another lawyer who received the call from the same number), both didn’t really intend their social media posts for police to trace the scammers. As I said on Facebook, it’s really less about these extortion attempts, but more about this climate of impunity arising from police failure to solve the killings and attempted killings these past three years. It’s this climate that encouraged scammers to so brazenly try to victimize lawyers this time. The scammers capitalize on our fear and sense of helplessness because the government seems inutile.
I was told by a friend about government doctors having been victimized by these scammers, but the crimes remain unreported in media because either nothing came out of the investigation or the victims just kept it to themselves because they were afraid or ashamed.
Apparently, lawyers are different. They are inclined to make noise – to warn fellow lawyers and everybody about the attempted scam – and for my good friends Kim and Daymeg – to make a more important point. That more important point is the state of impunity in this country.
Is there impunity in the Philippines? Former Bayan Muna representative and lawyer Neri Colmenares raised this question in a forum attended by law students last Saturday.
The former senatorial candidate from the opposition has a simple definition of impunity. Impunity is when people commit crimes and get away with it, he said. “And Philippines has the worst form of impunity in the world because people commit crimes because they know they can get away with it,” Colmenares said.
Rauchfuss and Schmolze, wrote in 2008 in “Torture” journal, a peer-reviewed medical journal on rehabilitation of torture victims and prevention of torture, their definition of impunity. Impunity “is the inability to overcome the legal protection of the perpetrators assured by impunity laws, incomplete truth-finding, missing integral reparation and a lack of the necessary acknowledgment by society.”
For Colmenares, impunity may be classified into grassroots impunity, prosecutorial immunity, and judicial impunity. “Impunity happens when we short-circuit the linear process of our criminal justice system,” he said. “When there is a violation of the rights of farmers in Negros, tatakutin ang pamilya, hindi na sila ngayon magfa-file ng complaint – that is grassroots impunity,” Colmenares said.
“From the victim to the police. Police will investigate then file a complaint before the prosecutor. The prosecutor conducts a preliminary investigation then file an Information before the court. After trial the judge makes a ruling, then the losing party files an appeal and so on and so forth. You cut anywhere in that line, impunity reigns,” Colmenares said.
In other countries, the prosecutors investigate beyond the evidence presented by parties in order to get to the bottom of a crime. That means the prosecutorial system leaves no stone unturned in finding out the truth.
But ours is a linear process, not an interactive one. For lack of space, I will continue with this topic in my next column, including the social and personal cost to you and me of this situation of impunity.
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