Justice depends on political color

He fought back, lumaban, so I did it.” That was the robber’s justification for killing a cabbie who refused to part with his day’s earnings. The remark sounded so much like the police’s routine explanation – “nanlaban, they fought back” – for the nightly slayings of drug suspects, 3,850 so far, since mid-2016. If that discomfited PNP chief Bato dela Rosa, who was presenting the murderer to the press, he didn’t show it. He just butted in to ask if the guy was a shabu junkie. Perhaps the latter had wanted to add that he’d seen this famous man on TV constantly prescribing the killing of those who would fight back. But he had to quickly deny being an addict. Besides, that prescription pertains to cops.

Speaking of which, two ranking cops indicted for murdering an anticrime advocate last year were granted bail this month and reinstated. Back on duty with full salaries at the Mindoro police are Senior Insp. Magdalino Pimentel Jr. and Insp. Markson Almeranez. They are charged with killing Citizens Crime Watch regional head Zenaida Luz. On the night of the murder Luz had received a text from a supposed vigilante-killer seeking help to surrender. While waiting outside her house in Pilar town for the visitor, two men on a motorcycle drove by and shot her several times. The driver was wearing a ski mask, the back-rider a wig. Cops in a nearby precinct gave chase and cornered the assailants who fought back. Both shot in the belly, they yelled “tropa, tropa,” to mean they are fellow-cops. Only then did the pursuers recognize the decorated officers. Weeks earlier dela Rosa had awarded Almeranez for outstanding service as police chief of the adjacent town.

“We had no choice” but to restore the duo after the bail grant, the Internal Affairs Service for Mindoro claimed. Supposedly it’s procedural. Yet only last Aug. the Mindoro police had discharged them for administrative breaches. The victim’s sister derided the judge for ignoring the evidence, witnesses, and police chase. Emissaries allegedly had offered the family P2.5 million and pressured the investigators to desist. So goes what human rights lawyer and new presidential spokesman Harry Roque calls a clear case of extrajudicial killing.

Still on cops, Ombudsman Conchita Carpio-Morales has charged ex-President Noynoy Aquino for the deaths of 44 PNP commandos in the hands of Moro separatists in 2015. Allegedly Aquino usurped authority in making the thensuspended PNP chief Alan Purisima oversee the commandos’ infiltration of rebel territory. Purisima’s absence from the chain of command supposedly caused the massacre of the 44 cops.

Anticrime watchdogs belittled the rap as designed to acquit. CarpioMorales allegedly filed it only to end any more twits of selective justice. She doesn’t really want to jail Aquino, they say. After all it was the latter who had plucked her out of retirement in 2011 to be Ombudsman till mid-2018. The rap deliberately was warped, no less than successor President and ex-public prosecutor Rody Duterte says. Aquino could not have usurped any authority for it was within his presidential powers to tap any officer for duty. The charge should be reckless imprudence resulting to multiple homicides, for which he would fry, the critics add.

Carpio-Morales is under fire for earlier charging three anti-Aquino senators with pork barrel plunder while sparing others who were Aquino allies. For that reason, present Justice Sec. Vitaliano Aguirre is investigating the past pork of two such pro-Aquino senators. It seems that justice now depends on one’s political color.

Weak charges seem to be in vogue too. Bailable charges of bribery, instead of non-bailable plunder, were filed against two Immigration high officials in a casino financier’s payoff. Disregarded were the criminal acts of soliciting, accepting, and hiding the money. Given undue weight was the amount recovered after the fact – P49,999,000 –P1,000 short of the P50,000,000-threshold for plunder. As a result, commissioners Al Argosino and Michael Robles will be out of jail while on trial. Both are law school fraternity mates of Aguirre and Duterte.

Weak charges possibly were filed against the Customs officials linked to the 605-kilo P6.4-billion shabu smuggling at the Manila port. One of the accused, Neil Anthony Estrella, hinted as much in seeking dismissal of the rap. Supposedly the complaint for graft and collusion was based solely on the report of the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency. As ex-Customs deputy for intelligence and investigation, Estrella said the PDEA had no role in or knowledge of Customs inspections. So the supposed inside info of two PDEA officer-witnesses were mere lies and innuendos. Aguirre’s State Prosecutor Aristotle Reyes allegedly presented no evidence.

Is acquittal inevitable? Not if CarpioMorales can help it. Wary of Aguirre’s intentions, she is conducting her own investigation of the narco-trafficking, focusing on Duterte’s Customs chief Nick Faeldon.

That’s only fair, to put a stop to drug smuggling by people in high places. Sen. Antonio Trillanes wants Carpio-Morales to implicate as well Duterte’s son, Davao City vice mayor Paolo Duterte. Citing a Customs broker’s testimony, hundredmillion-peso bank deposits, and a tattoo of the Hong Kong Triads on Paolo’s back, he alleges that the presidential son is a narco-trader.

Trillanes strangely is silent about another of his suspects, Maneses Carpio, Duterte’s son-in-law, the spouse of Davao City mayor Sara Duterte. In the Senate inquiry on the shabu smuggling Trillanes had alleged that Carpio and Paolo were partners in a “Davao group” of Customs influence peddlers. He’s not mentioning him now to Carpio-Morales.

Maneses Carpio is the Ombudsman’s nephew, the son of her lawyer-brother Lucas Carpio.

Lucas is the lawyer of the shoddy maintenance contractor of the government’s MRT-3 commuter railway. In 2015 then-transport secretary and Liberal Party president Joseph Abaya had granted a P3.8-billion maintenance deal by closed-door negotiation instead of public bidding. The company is said to be owned by two LP financiers, also involved in two past equally slipshod maintenance servicers and in Abaya’s purchase of defective trains from China. Morales-Carpio has not charged Abaya, whom Aquino treats as the little brother he never had. Trillanes has never denounced the MRT-3’s deterioration under Abaya and the LP contractors. For six months in 2015, Trillanes’ cousin and biggest contributor to his 2013 election, was among Abaya’s maintenance subcontractors.

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The Ombudsman charges those whom Duterte’s justice secretary refuses to touch, and vice versa.