After former senator Leila de Lima was acquitted on May 12 in the second drug case against her, Justice Secretary Jesus Crispin Remulla preened with satisfaction: “[The] prevalence of the rule of law … shows that the independence of the judiciary is a basic foundation of our democratic system.”
In the next breath, the same justice secretary said that acquittal “does not mean there’s absolutely no guilt.”
I agree, especially in rape cases where the victims have been killed and silenced, while the accused, moneyed, and powerful went scot-free because circumstantial evidence have been made weak or compromised. Or the surviving eyewitnesses have vanished from the face of the earth or have gone to parts unknown to enjoy life as a beach.
But the second statement from the secretary in relation to De Lima’s acquittal, grates, and grates painfully on one’s wounds. Don’t we say that an accused is presumed innocent until proven guilty? Now that the accused, De Lima in this case, has been acquitted or declared innocent, she is to be presumed guilty? Those who think this way of De Lima’s acquittal should learn to solve the Sudoku puzzle in this paper for better logical thinking. To wit: “If X is true, then Y is false.”
After De Lima’s acquittal on May 12, I went over my four-part Q and A with her that appeared in this space in 2021. It was a long interview that could give us many de profundis moments. I took a screenshot of a small portion that was appropriate for that day to post on Facebook. That was her speaking about the three cases against her. (This was before the series of stunning retractions by witnesses against her.) As we know, with De Lima acquitted in two cases, there is only one more to go. And a petition for bail. She has been in solitary confinement for six years.
This deserves repeating: Why De Lima thought she could be proven innocent.
“1. There’s no corpus delicti or body of the crime, meaning, the kind or volume of alleged drugs that is basic premise for any drug case was never identified;
“2. There’s no money or paper trail linking me to any illegal drug transactions;
“3. There’s no conspiracy because … no one has admitted in being a co-conspirator who has personal knowledge of illegal drug transactions, let alone to dealing with me personally;
“4. There’s no drug case; instead, what became apparent was (a) a kidnap-for-ransom case involving crooked cops who extorted money from a Bilibid convict whose niece they kidnapped; and (b) a bribery case involving Bureau of Corrections officials who took money from convicts in exchange for certain favors—neither of which had anything to do with illegal drugs, let alone with me;
“5. There is no credible testimony from witnesses who are mostly Bilibid inmates—their accounts were mere hearsay, riddled with inconsistencies, and without any proof.”
There’s more in the Q and A that can be fodder for meditation. I thought of those who wrote their reflections while or after going through the darkest moments in their lives. I thought of Austrian Holocaust survivor and psychiatrist Viktor Frankl who gave us “Man’s Search for Meaning” and logotherapy. I thought of German Lutheran pastor and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer who died in Hitler’s concentration camp. His “Letters and Papers from Prison,” published after his death, was a testament to his convictions. I thought of writer Elie Wiesel, Nobel Peace Prize winner …
I thought of former senators Benigno Aquino Jr. and Jose W. Diokno who languished in jail during Marcos’ martial rule. I thought of friends and colleagues who suffered the same.
But one thing that bothered me deeply these past days was the unspeakable cruelty that De Lima has been made to undergo for six years now and how government resources (our taxes) have been used in very purposeful ways to make her suffer, to punish her for what she believed was right as chair of the Commission on Human Rights and later as senator of the republic during the reign of President Rodrigo Duterte.
How many man-hours have been used, how much money has been spent, how many persons in government—law enforcers, prosecutors, court personnel, guards, etc.—have had to do duty in order that De Lima’s tormentors in high places would delight in seeing her being dealt the ultimate cruelty? A costly undertaking, indeed.
Remember, too, the tens of thousands who were killed in Duterte’s brutal drug war, they who could not fight back, they who were not given the chance to prove themselves innocent or worthy of a new life.
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