Selective humanitarian reason?
Today’s good news was the release of jeepney drivers arrested for picket protests to demand the return of their livelihoods. The bad news is this: only 4 out of 6 drivers were released.
The other two drivers, Winston Ranilla and the 72-year-old Elmer Cordero, will have to remain behind bars in a while.
For context: Acting Executive Judge Dorothy Grace Daguna-Inciong of Caloocan Metropolitan Trial Court Branch 52 signed the order allowing the six drivers to post P3,000 bail each, nearly a week after Caloocan cops arrested them for alleged violations of physical distancing protocols when they protested the continuing ban on public utility vehicles, which includes jeepneys.
Out of what had become the #Piston6, only four of them walked out from prison: Severino Ramos (59 years old), Ramon Paloma (48 years old), Arsenio Ymas (56 years old), and Ruben Baylon (59 years old). According to #Piston6’s lawyer, Vicente Jaime Topacio, the other two who remained in detention still have “to fix something” before they can be released.
For Cordero, the eldest of them, a supposed pending estafa charge hangs around his neck — or a person who carries the same name as his. His camp still awaits the verification process to determine if the case was indeed slapped against him, or another person who only happened to be his namesake.
How hard is it to verify whether a person faces actual charges or not?
But here’s the catch: this kind of fate has not befallen other elderly people who were ACTUALLY convicted — not suspected or mistaken — of criminal acts.
Power, it seems, is the great divider.
On November 9, 2018, the anti-graft court Sandiganbayan formally convicted former First Lady and Ilocos Norte 2nd district representative Imelda Romualdez-Marcos of seven counts of graft in connection with the creation of private Swiss foundations tied to $200-M in the Marcoses’ stolen wealth, which the court ruled to be Imelda’s way of hiding their ill-gotten fortunes. Included in the conviction were a minimum of six years of imprisonment for each count of graft slapped on Mrs. Marcos, as well as a perpetual disqualification from holding public office.
The litigation took 27 years — a harrowing time frame — just to reach that initial conviction.
Human rights groups, who were doggedly fighting to exact justice from the remnants of the late dictator Ferdinand E. Marcos, as well as actual victims of the Marcos dictatorship, were jubilant over the news. In fact, as Jason Gutierrez’s report for The New York Times quoted:
“I am literally jumping with joy,” Ms. [Loretta Ann] Rosales said in an interview. She said the ruling showed that there were still public corruption judges “who have helped keep the candles lit through these dark nights and pursued the truth.”
But the euphoria quickly crumbled.
As calls for the immediate arrest of the former First Lady roared, so did the assertions that having her convicted and having her arrested are two different routes — and that to have Imelda arrested will be a tough one. Both the anti-graft court and some legal experts claimed that an appeal for reconsideration and Imelda’s old age could save her from prison.
They were right.
When asked about the looming arrest of Imelda Marcos, former Philippine National Police chief Oscar Albayalde answered with the following excuse:
“May edad na kasi (she is already elderly). We have to take into consideration the edad, the age. […] In any arrest, anybody for that matter, that has to be taken into consideration: the health, the age.”
A few weeks later, Imelda was allowed to post P350,000 in bail to purchase temporary freedom. The anti-graft court, after her conviction, eventually considered the former First Lady’s health and age in deciding to allow her to post bail. In its November 28, 2018 decision, Sandiganbayan ruled:
“Taking into account primarily the fact that she is of advanced age and for health reasons, consistent with the doctrine in Enrile vs Sandiganbayan, bail is allowed for these 7 cases.”
And yet, we do not hear this assertion now from the same institutions — the police and the court — that now continue to hold Lolo Elmer behind bars.
Way back further, in 2015, another glaring contrast occurred.
With a vote of 8 against 4, the Supreme Court ruled on August 15, 2015 that it will allow former senator Juan Ponce Enrile’s petition to post bail amounting to P1-M for the plunder charges he was facing, in connection with the 2013 pork barrel scam. Enrile, along with former senator Jinggoy Estrada and Ramon Revilla Jr. (who won again in the 2019 polls), were the primary accused in the large-scale theft of P10-B from their Priority Assistance Development Funds (PDAF) which were skimmed off through shady non-government organizations (NGO).
Plunder is supposed to be a non-bailable charge, but Enrile’s case is perplexingly different. Straight from the Supreme Court’s ruling that Justice Lucas Bersamin wrote as ponente, the following were written:
To start with, the People were not kept in the dark on the health condition of the petitioner. Through his Omnibus Motion dated June 10, 2014 and his Motion to Fix Bail dated July 7, 2014, he manifested to the Sandiganbayan his currently frail health, and presented medical certificates to show that his physical condition required constant medical attention. The Omnibus Motion and his Supplemental Opposition dated June 16, 2014 were both heard by the Sandiganbayan after the filing by the Prosecution of its Consolidated Opposition. Through his Motion for Reconsideration, he incorporated the findings of the government physicians to establish the present state of his health. On its part, the Sandiganbayan, to satisfy itself of the health circumstances of the petitioner, solicited the medical opinions of the relevant doctors from the Philippine General Hospital. The medical opinions and findings were also included in the petition for certiorari and now form part of the records of the case.
Apart from Enrile’s frail health condition, the High Court’s decision also made mention of his nonagenarian age:
There was really no reasonable way for the Court to deny bail to him simply because his situation of being 92 years of age when he was first charged for the very serious crime in court was quite unique and very rare. To ignore his advanced age and unstable health condition in order to deny his right to bail on the basis alone of the judicial discretion to deny bail would be probably unjust. To equate his situation with that of the other accused indicted for a similarly serious offense would be inherently wrong when other conditions significantly differentiating his situation from that of the latter’s unquestionably existed.
In legal gobbledygook, this became known as the Enrile doctrine.
Hence, if the Supreme Court can invoke “humanitarian reasons” such as age and health to allow a detained senator to post bail for what is supposedly a non-bailable charge, what forbids the Caloocan court now from giving Lolo Elmer the very similar considerations?
He is 72 years old.
He is frail.
He probably endures several health ailments.
Along with the five other drivers detained alongside him, his only “crime” was to allegedly violate a protocol in protesting the return of their sole livelihood — the jeepney he rides. Meanwhile, Imelda Marcos and Johnny Enrile — the two most odious faces of the Marcos dictatorship — were convicted for crimes that involved the stealing of gargantuan amounts, millions and billions of pesos, from state coffers which could have been used to assist people like Lolo Elmer and his ilk of drivers.
And yet, they were given enough consideration by the courts.
Besides the name and the charge he is facing, what makes him different from Imelda or Enrile?
To stretch the point further, which is the greater crime that does not necessitate “humanitarian” consideration — a protest over the possible loss of one’s livelihood, or the furtive acts of plunder committed to enrich one’s self and family, at the expense of the poorest of the poor?
This is one of the most absurd reasons that I find mesmerizing and outrageous about Rodrigo Duterte’s brand of justice. The COVID-19 pandemic heavily exposed these walls of injustice further.
Ordinary people and working-class men are being arrested in their tens of thousands for numerous Enhanced Community Quarantine protocol violations. Like the #Piston6, 7 activists in Cebu were hauled off to prison for supposedly violating the ban on mass gatherings and physical distancing after they held a protest right outside the campus to counter the proposed anti-terror bill.
Winston Ragos, a former soldier who was relieved from duty because of his post-stress traumatic disorder (PTSD), was shot dead by policemen when he allegedly posed a risk to their lives by acting to pull out a gun — which the National Bureau of Investigation’s own findings that policemen planted the gun on his body had debunked.
As of today, according to the PNP, it has now arrested 140,000 quarantine violators.
Yet, out of these arrests, no gesture was ever done to hold accountable and imprison powerful people who had also violated the quarantine protocols: Senator Aquilino “Koko” Pimentel III, Overseas Workers Administration deputy administrator Margaux “Mocha” Uson, and National Capital Region Police Office chief Debold Sinas.
Pimentel breached the protocol imposed on patients under investigation when he insisted on going to the Makati Medical Center even after he complained of symptoms of the virus. Days later, he found out he was positive.
Uson, despite the ban on mass gatherings (and the Bayanihan To Heal As One Act’s supposed provisions against “fake news”), has continued with her campaign of disinformation and called for a huge gathering of Overseas Filipino Workers in a beach.
And Sinas? Oh, boy, you don’t even have to attend Spanish classes to understand what mañanita means. Sinas’ “surprise” birthday party, attended by more than 50 visitors, gives us a popular imagination for that — replete with hotdogs, a Voltes V cake, and San Miguel beer cans. Sinas and his visitors violated the ban on mass gathering, the liquor ban still existing then, and even physical distancing protocols.
But do you see them behind bars?
An individual can be jailed for a protest, a tweet, a miniscule act of forgetting one’s face mask while in a rush, or even for offering a back ride to a relative — but mañanitas and lame excuses about excitement for a child’s birth despite knowledge of one’s impending sickness can never go wrong. In fact, these acts can qualify someone for the Duterte regime’s show of “rigors of compassion.”
The same predicament now appears in Lolo Elmer’s case.
People like him can go on in detention out of some “verification” as to whether or not he faces an estafa charge — while graft convict Imelda Romualdez-Marcos enjoys freedom purchased with P350,000 in bail for graft charges covering P200-M in stolen wealth.
Ask yourselves: do you still believe that justice is a tangible concept under this regime?
The answer is right in front of you.
