Extreme frustration

Five or six executions daily? Death penalty opponents need not worry.

A death sentence requires final affirmation by the Supreme Court before it can be carried out. President Duterte’s super majority in Congress can railroad the restoration of capital punishment all they want. But given the sorry state of the Philippine judicial system, with the expected slew of appeals and restraining orders for every case calling for capital punishment, we could all be dead and Dirty Rody would have OD’d on fentanyl before any convict is executed by the state.

In fact, extremely slow Philippine justice is one of the main factors behind the strong public support for the extreme opposite – the law enforcement shortcuts offered by Dirty Rody’s Oplan Tokhang and Double Barrel.

People fed up with cases that languish in court for 20 years find instant gratification in “cardboard justice” and the gruesome Pinoy “mummies” that keep piling up. Incidentally, “mummy” is police slang for those corpses with the heads wrapped in plastic and packing tape. Where did Du30 pick up the term?

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There is another possible factor behind public support for mass extermination: there’s a homicidal maniac in each of us just waiting to be freed.

Controlling such urges is what supposedly separates man from beast. But now, here comes a president of the republic, defending and even rewarding his cops with fat Christmas bonuses (withdrawn yesterday ostensibly for lack of funds) for mass murder well done.

The unequivocal message is that there’s no problem big enough that you can’t shoot it to death. Tokhang and Double Barrel produce instant, irreversible results – unlike the wheels of Philippine justice, which turn so slowly it’s an injustice.

There’s also the problem of justice for sale. You can tell from the failure to send to prison any of the obscenely wealthy, notorious or both that if you’re going to steal in this country, you have to steal big so that if ever you are caught and prosecuted, you can afford the best justice money can buy.

Even drug traffickers can buy their way to a court acquittal, or to illegal deportation by the Bureau of Immigration. High-value suspects have even walked away from detention at the PNP headquarters at Camp Crame.

Because of such incidents, Pinoys are willing to give President Duterte a free hand in exterminating drug suspects. Even if, as he himself admitted, what he has against those in his so-called narco list is just “probable cause” instead of proof beyond reasonable doubt, which is the requirement for conviction and sentencing.

People have also been frustrated for a long time over the abuses of public officials, and are happy to see a president including in his drug hit list local political warlords, ranking police officers and barangay officials.

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Filipinos who see no hope in the criminal justice system see the drug war in a positive light. Du30 realizes this and seems to take pride in what he’s doing. He continues to take potshots at his closest rival in the presidential race, asking if the rival could have waged this kind of war on drugs and criminality.

Du30’s sustained public fulmination against Mar Roxas and the Liberal Party long after the election campaign is over is intriguing. The buzz is that Du30 believes the LP and Roxas are orchestrating moves for Duterte’s ouster and replacement with Vice President Leni Robredo and his possible indictment for crimes against humanity before the International Criminal Court.

A photo of Sen. Leila de Lima abroad, flashing the L for LP sign as she displays a blown-up copy of a foreign news article critical of Du30’s drug war, is certain to stoke his anger at the once ruling party, which he blames for much of the negative stories about him during the campaign.

Duterte’s landslide victory has been seen largely as a reaction to the record of daang sarado, notably Roxas, for slow action on many of the nation’s problems. So it’s doubtful that the majority of Filipinos would go along with any LP-linked plot to oust Du30 at this point.

What Duterte should worry about is if people start comparing him with the previous administration in terms of failure to address festering problems.

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Among these problems is the weak criminal justice system. The judiciary is an independent and co-equal branch, and the Supreme Court must improve the administration of justice if its members want to help put an end to the ongoing killing spree.

But the executive is in charge of other pillars of justice: the prosecution service, the police, jails and penal facilities.The prosecution service also needs to speed up its work and improve its credibility. And the PNP must do more than shoot to kill. The number of cases indicating abuse of police power in the guise of the drug war keeps rising. The inability or unwillingness of the PNP to investigate the continuing killings, especially questionable deaths traced to the police, is breeding impunity and creating an atmosphere of fear even among law-abiding citizens – as indicated in the latest Social Weather Stations survey.

Our jails are porous and the national penitentiary has been turned into the command center for large-scale drug trafficking.

The President can also wield some influence over the courts through his power to appoint and promote members of the judiciary. Duterte must pick individuals with known integrity and competence especially for the Supreme Court and must avoid compromising the independence of his appointees.

Still, the burden of judicial reforms lies heaviest on the nation’s highest court. Tokhang and Double Barrel – and public support for the Pinoy version of capital punishment – are extreme manifestations of public frustration over slow justice.

The drug menace has been around since before I was born. It has survived martial law and it can survive Tokhang.

President Duterte can exterminate as many expendables as he wants. But without the corresponding reforms in the criminal justice system, any positive impact of his mass killings on the campaign against drug trafficking and other crimes will be unsustainable.

The Supreme Court must show the public that the judicial system works, that the rule of law can prevail and there is no need for shortcuts to justice.