There’s The Rub
Who can?
By: Conrado de QuirosPhilippine Daily Inquirer
The idea itself is justifiable, even laudable. The Department of Justice is well within its rights to reinvestigate cases where the scions of wealthy families got away with murder precisely for being scions of wealthy families. The implication being that the families used their wealth to get their scions acquitted. The implication being that the judges used their positions to enrich themselves. The implication being that justice may not be allowed to be held hostage to lucre, however it takes a lifetime to ransom justice.
Justice delayed is not always justice denied. Sometimes it can be justice savored like wine. But I don’t know why the Justice Department should be especially riveted to the past when the present offers no lack for cases of justice being patently thwarted by the rich and powerful. When it itself has, for example, decided to drop the case against the suspected mastermind of Gerry Ortega’s murder, ex-Gov. Joel Reyes, preferring instead to just pin down the triggermen. What is this, you can spot with eagle eyes something that lies in the distance but not something that stares you in the face? But I’ll leave that for another day.
The idea itself is justifiable, even laudable, but I draw the line at Hubert Webb. My objection to it in fact is a violent one.
At the very least, and truly this is trifling in the scheme of things, the Justice Department offers no new, startling, awe-inspiring evidence to show Webb’s guilt. It says it has new witnesses to swear that Webb was in the country when the massacre took place. It says it has new evidence to show he never boarded the plane to the US that he claimed he did.
Maybe. But they have yet to scuttle the one piece of evidence Webb has that he was in the US at the time of the Vizconde massacre. Which is the US Immigration record that he entered the country before the murders and left the same country after them, a fact duly stamped on his passport. That was the one piece of evidence that brought the Supreme Court to reverse previous court decisions that had found him guilty and sent him to prison for much of his adult life.
I myself have heard all sorts of objections to that evidence. One is that it wasn’t Hubert but one of his brothers who posed as him. Another is that he altered the dates of the record that’s stamped on his passport. Well, all those are speculations, which is this country’s favorite pastime. Unless you can get incontrovertible proof it wasn’t Hubert there—how hard can it be to check that with US authorities?—you have to take it as fact. Witnesses you can produce aplenty, which is this country’s second favorite pastime, but between the word of those witnesses and the objective evidence of his being in the US at the time of the murders, which will you believe?
At the very most, and this is the all-important thing here, the Justice Department should have presented its case before the Supreme Court ruled with finality on Webb’s case, not after.
To begin with, Webb’s case does not carry the criteria for reopening cases fraught with patent injustice. Webb was jailed for 15 years on the strength of the convictions handed down by the CFI and appeals court. If he is innocent, as we must deem him to be on the basis of the Supreme Court’s ruling, then it is not only that he has not gotten away with anything, it is that he has been done a monumental injustice. He does not deserve persecution, he deserves restitution.
If a charge of corruption has been brought against any one of the justices that ruled to have Webb freed, then the reinvestigation of the case would at least carry some weight. True enough, fighting corruption is the new government’s agenda, and the corrupt—and their corruptors—ought to be punished. But there is none of that. The whole notion is simply that the Supreme Court made a mistake.
If the ruling had been made during Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo’s time, then the reinvestigation could also carry some weight. Her regime corrupted all the institutions of society, chief of them the Supreme Court. (Though it is a testament of the chief justices of her time that they remained reasonably resistant to the pestilence.) You’d have to wonder if Malacañang itself did not have a hand in Webb’s reversal of fortunes. But the ruling took place during P-Noy’s time.
All this reduces the Justice Department’s position again merely to the Supreme Court having made a mistake. It has nothing to do with corruption, it has nothing to do with perversion, it has nothing to do with the scions of the rich getting away because they are rich, it has to do only with the Supreme Court possibly being in error. Or so by the Justice Department’s reckoning.
That is not justice, that is oppression. How many times do you have to try a man before declaring him guilty or innocent and according him the punishment or liberty he deserves? It’s bad enough that the Supreme Court itself keeps reopening cases it has already ruled upon “with finality,” making a complete mockery of the word “final.” Does the Justice Department have to make it worse? If Webb is innocent, as we must deem him to be by the Court’s ruling, then he has already been done a monumental injustice by being jailed for 15 years. If Webb has already been done a monumental injustice by being jailed for 15 years, as we must deem him to have been by the Court’s ruling, how begin to describe the damnable thing the Justice Department is doing to him now?
In the end, it does the very opposite of what the Justice Department sets out to do, which is to correct the miscarriage of justice that tends to attach to scions of the rich. Because this one simply makes us ask:
If a scion of the rich himself cannot find justice in this country, who can?
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Tags: acquittal , Department of Justice , former Gov. Joel Reyes , Gerry Ortega’s murder , Hubert webb , vizconde massacre
