EDITORIAL - A national embarrassment

Maybe the victims should be grateful for small mercies. Eighteen years is an eternity in the wait for justice, but the other day a Chinese-Filipino couple finally saw their kidnappers sentenced to life in prison without eligibility for parole. The convicts were also ordered to pay the victims P700,000 in damages.

Two of the defendants have died in detention. A woman convicted as an accomplice because her house was used by the gang in planning the 1997 kidnapping was ordered freed because she had been in jail longer than her maximum sentence of 12 years.

An anti-crime group has described the trial of the members of the Waray-Waray gang as the longest ever in the history of ransom kidnapping cases in the Philippines. It is unclear why it took the Quezon City Regional Trial Court Branch 98 under Judge Marilou Runes-Tamang nearly two decades to decide on the case. But the length of litigation is not unusual and has been seen in cases involving many other crimes and even in civil disputes.

The snail-paced adjudication of legal cases is one of the biggest reasons for impunity in the perpetration of offenses such as lethal fraternity hazing, pyramiding scams, violations of maritime safety rules that have killed thousands over the past three decades, drug deals and human trafficking.

Slow justice is also one of the reasons for tacit public support for short cuts to law enforcement. If it takes 18 years for a kidnapping case to hurdle the regional trial court, victims will prefer to see their tormentors killed in purported shootouts with police. A spate of such alleged armed encounters with several notorious kidnap-for-ransom gangs ended a wave of kidnappings targeting Chinese Filipinos in the late 1990s and raised the national profile of the anti-kidnapping enforcer at the time, Panfilo Lacson.

The Supreme Court, which is in charge of supervising the lower courts, should give urgency to speeding up the wheels of Philippine justice. The current pace has become a national embarrassment and an injustice.