EDITORIAL - GCTA Law in need of urgent overhaul

As the controversy surrounding the Good Conduct Time Allowance (GCTA) Law continues to grip the country, the grace period that President Rodrigo Duterte gave to released convicts for them to surrender will expire few days from now.

Criminal Investigation and Detection Group (CIDG)-7 Deputy Chief Police Lieutenant Colonel Hector Amancia said there are already 30 convicts in Central Visayas who surrendered to the authorities as he called on the remaining GCTA beneficiaries to turn over themselves to the police.

"As of this time atong surrenderees naabot na ug around 30, we're still accepting sa mga surrenderees. Makig-coordinate sila sa mga neareast police station para dili sila maabtan sa deadline which is September 19 because after September 19, if they cannot voluntarily surrender themselves to authorities, they will be considered fugitives," Amancia said.

The Deputy City Director for Operation of the Cebu City Police Office, Lieutenant Colonel Leoncio Baliguat Jr., echoed Amancia’s appeal to remaining GCTA beneficiaries to surrender. Those surrendered convicts will be brought to a jail facility of the Bureau of Corrections in Abuyog, Leyte.

However, not all freed convicts have yielded to the authorities. Many of them chose to defy the president’s order and continued to savor their newly found freedom after at least two decades of languishing at the National Bilibid Prison.

Of course, they have every reason to opt not to yield despite the threat of being killed during police manhunt. For them, being freed under the GCTA Law was not their fault since they had already complied with all its provisions.

And the fact that they applied and were approved for release from detention only means their freedom came by virtue of being eligible under the GCTA Law. So why bother to surrender when your freedom was lawfully granted?

The problem is that the government is now scrambling to re-arrest those freed convicts, forgetting the fact that the need to totally overhaul the GCTA Law is also equally important.