Swift justice - SKETCHES by Ana Marie Pamintuan

A few years back some of my friends sent their children abroad to study and live without fear of being kidnapped. The children are still abroad; not even the much vaunted anti-kidnapping campaign of Joseph Estrada could persuade my friends to bring their children back.

I don’t know how successful President Arroyo will be in her anti-kidnapping program. Often she may find herself faced with people who, though they won’t say it, want swift justice – the kind that does away with a protracted court trial.

It’s not just a craving for instant gratification. Consider yourself a kidnap victim. If you’re rescued and the kidnappers are arrested, you will continue to live in fear, worrying that your tormentors may escape or send someone to harass you again. The anxiety worsens if you have been tortured or raped while in captivity. The thought of facing the kidnappers in court and recounting your ordeal in a public trial could make you want to just hang yourself. You will never want to see your kidnappers again. If someone can exterminate the kidnappers like vermin, you’ll consider yourself forever in that person’s debt.

Then there are kidnap victims who would rather not call attention to their family’s source of wealth. These are the most vulnerable to shakedowns: tax evaders, smugglers, people with minor criminal records such as estafa or illegal recruitment, and of course the heavy hitters in the crime world – the drug dealers, bank robbers, guns-for-hire and gambling lords. You can understand why some of them won’t report a kidnapping, and even resent it when busybodies include them in statistics of unreported crime. Such victims just pay the ransom and leave the country.

Sometimes they do get up the nerve to seek police assistance to recover a loved one from kidnappers. But you can understand why they’d prefer to have the kidnappers shot dead "while trying to escape from police custody."

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How much are you willing to pay for peace of mind? Some years back there was a father who paid a police team a million bucks to kill two of his child’s kidnappers. For such victims, the executioner is a hero. Who cares if a cop is a serial murderer, so long as he’s on your side?

In a democracy, however, such short cuts to justice can have diminishing returns. The power over life and death is absolute power, and it’s been said often enough how this can corrupt absolutely.

When President GMA convenes the peace and order summit on April 18, participants must decide how they want to deal not just with kidnappers but other criminals. In a free society, the criminal justice system moves slowly. Gathering of evidence alone can take time. While we’re all impatient for results, a deliberate pace has its positive points. It can protect the innocent and help ensure that a case will prosper in court. If you keep rounding up suspects simply for the public’s consumption and to improve crime statistics, the likelihood is high that you’ll end up with the wrong guys – which means the real crooks will still be out there, laughing their heads off and ready to sow terror again.

When cops trot out their record of apprehensions and cases deemed solved, they should also provide figures on cases that led to convictions. Then the public can have a better appreciation of law enforcers’ performance.

If cops are encouraged to get a case over with by executing suspects, the temptation to abuse this power for personal ends can be irresistible. And such cops are likely to be tapped for purposes other than crime-busting by persons in power.

This doesn’t mean we should stop prodding law enforcers to get the bad guys as quickly and efficiently as possible. In crimes such as kidnapping for ransom, a matter of hours can mean the difference between life and death.

Without short cuts, can our law enforcers do it?

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ONLY IN RP: Live Show isn’t dead, there’s a thriving business in VCDs and videotapes of the movie. Since it’s now officially taboo, you can bet your teenager has seen it. I hope that after watching it, President GMA at least got inspired to fast-track her programs to ease poverty, which is what the movie is about. Even if the explicit sex scenes were cut, I think the Church would have found the movie objectionable. The bishops wouldn’t want the poor echoing the hopeless lament of the main male character: What if Heaven is just a rumor? What’s the use then of being good?