Drug war and the Courts
lower and probationable penalty. However, this mutually advantageous deal was not allowed under the law.
Estipona, a case from Legazpi City, changed all of that. The Court declared Section 23 unconstitutional for being contrary to the rule-making authority of the Supreme Court. In our system of separation of powers, the authority to prescribe rules on plea-bargaining exclusively rests with the Court, not Congress.
This case whose issues ripened during the early days of the War on Drugs opened the door for pleabargaining en masse. In a later Resolution, the Court adopted a framework where only drug suspects caught with small amounts of illegal drugs could avail of pleabargaining. For example, those caught with less than 1 gram of shabu can avail of plea-bargaining. After the release of the framework last May 2018, the City jail’s male dormitory congestion rate declined by 206.01%. But application for probation and recognizance spiked. Our drug treatment facilities, both private and public, struggle to keep up with the sudden and massive demand.
Section 21 of RA 9165, as amended outlines the Chain of Custody Rule. This essentially means that the movement of seized drugs from the crime scene to the Court should be duly recorded and identified. One integral part of the rule is the witness requirement. The presence of a barangay official and a media representative or a DOJ representative is needed during the inventory of seized items. Failure to strictly follow the rules would taint the integrity of the seized items and lead to acquittal. Thousands of drug cases met their deaths because of such failure.
The two other cases, Ga-a and Lim, both coming from Cagayan de Oro City, emphasized the burden of State authorities to strictly adhere to the Chain of Custody Rule. In Ga-a, the Court stressed, among others, that these witnesses “must be present at the time of and at or near the place of apprehension and seizure.” Even if physical inventory and photographing are allowed to be done at the nearest police station, this does not dispense with such requirement.
This is a rebuke to the common experience where witnesses do not have personal knowledge of the