When criminals strike, they operate under no rules whatsoever. No one expects them to give their victims “due process,” and that’s simply taken for granted. In just minutes, they get what they want. But when the victims’ relatives try to seek retributive justice, they are expected to allow the criminals all the benefit of “due process,” i.e., court proceedings to prove their guilt beyond reasonable doubt. That could take some 10 or 15 years. Admittedly, the playing field is so screwed up.
As a lawyer grappling with the niceties of the law after my own son fell victim to a bullet from motorcycle-riding robbers, I was just too glad to react with any sense of revulsion to the “overkill” weeks the “Duterte Diehard Squads” dealt some motorcycle-riding thugs with, as they were fleeing from the scene of their crime. So very dead in their tracks—and nevermore to be a threat to society.
Bleeding hearts cried foul that the “suspects” were never given any chance in a court of law. To them we throw it back: Did the victims of those scumbags get any such chance?
It’s no wonder to me now that President Duterte is nailing it every time he faces the people to explain his side of the so-called extrajudicial killing narrative. I have been to some of his sorties where he talked on and on without triggering a yawn from anyone. I was totally amazed by the eager reception and rapt attention he always got not only from the usual captive audience, but even from former skeptics like me.
The President is nothing like any of the past presidents we heard before; they were so much into pompous but empty rhetoric. Even his curses and cusses, whenever he starts perorating about his “war” on drugs and criminality, sound much like he is taking the expletives right out of the people’s mouths and articulating their deep-seated frustrations. The people are sick and tired of a government promising everything but doing nothing to make this country safe.
Just ruminate on this: How the heck did the number of drug addicts/pushers reach more than 4 million if past administrations did anything about the drug menace in this country—which, as it turned out, now involves generals in the uniformed service, public officials in very high places, and such other “honorable” lowlifes as their coddlers/protectors? How could past presidents have played dumb all those years?
On a more flippant note, if the Constitution has to be amended, I for one would like to see the presidential term limit expunged. Mr. Duterte cannot undo in six years what past presidents had been ignoring for decades.
But will he survive past his age in the 70s? There is a saying that people with very active sex lives manage to remain alive up to a hundred and five. By the way, Mr. Duterte’s eyes light up as he watches pretty girls go by, I rest my case.
STEPHEN L. MONSANTO, Monsanto Law Office, Loyola Heights, Quezon City, lexsquare.firm@gmail.com