EDITORIAL - Dead men tell no tales

Many Filipinos don’t mind seeing criminals — even those who were never convicted or even arrested — shot dead in purported encounters with police. When you constantly worry about the safety of your children, when you can’t even enjoy a meal in a restaurant in peace, you don’t mind seeing the bad guys exterminated. Recent killings of suspected criminals elicited hardly a peep of protest from the public. It’s a short cut to justice, but our criminal justice system leaves much to be desired anyway, so why quibble with niceties in law enforcement?

It’s one thing to rid the nation of criminal vermin, however, and quite another to silence individuals who can talk about the involvement of police and military personnel in criminal activities. This is the risk of resorting to extrajudicial methods of enforcing the law. Such power over life and death is prone to abuse. Unless the brakes are applied on the use of such methods, they can further undermine an already weak criminal justice system.

Such concerns have been raised in the deaths of three suspected kidnap suspects the other day in Cavite. Rodolfo Patinio, Diosdado Santos and Eugene Radam were no ordinary crime suspects. Santos and Radam are both former Marine soldiers. Patinio was one of three men who escaped from the detention center of the National Anti-Kidnapping Task Force at Camp Crame a few months ago. The three were led by Faisal Marohombsar, founder of the Pentagon kidnap-for-ransom gang, who was himself shot dead in an alleged encounter with police, again in Cavite.

All three have been implicated in the New Year’s Eve murder of Baron Cervantes, self-styled spokesman of the rightist Young Officers’ Union, which has been linked to destabilization attempts against the Arroyo administration. Cervantes’ father said the confessed triggerman, Marine Sgt. Joseph Mostrales, had identified the three slain men as the ones who had placed the Cervantes home in Las Piñas under surveillance shortly before the murder.

0f course the encounter between the police and the three men in Cavite could have been legitimate. But with all three suspects dead, the nation is left with only one side of the story. And we may never know the truth about the murder of Cervantes.