New Chief Justice’s priority: Speed up wheels of justice

Sparkling new Chief Justice Maria Lourdes Sereno has a big job ahead of her. Everybody knows that the judiciary badly needs reforms if it is to successfully do what it is meant to do: Give justice to every man—quickly. Chief among these reforms is to speed up the very slow wheels of justice—perhaps the slowest in the world. A simple case takes years to decide, by which time some of the litigants may be dead or may have lost interest because of the delay. Witnesses also die or disappear, or are threatened or bribed to change their testimonies. There is plenty of time to do that because of the delay.

The slowest cases are the land cases which often take decades to decide. Most of the time, the original owners or claimants are already dead by the time the courts decide land cases. It is the next generations who have to finish the cases. Often, it is the children or grandchildren of the original litigants who receive the decisions of the courts.

Look at the land cases pending in the courts now. Some of them may go back to the Spanish and American occupations. Usually, the issue is the genuineness of land titles issued during those long ago regimes. A prime example is the fight over a prime piece of land in Balara among several landed families. The case dates back, I think, to the Commonwealth regime. As far as I know, the case is still pending in courts, including the Supreme Court, with these courts changing their decisions, awarding the land, first, to one family and then in a revised decision, to the other family.

Speaking of land claims, one reason squatting is proliferating is that the courts are too slow in deciding ejectment cases against squatters. A simple ejectment case takes the courts many years to decide even when the complainant is clearly the owner as proven by his land title, and the squatters, with no claims or evidence at all in their favor, simply resorting to delaying tactics, and with lazy or overly lenient judges not doing anything to speed up the cases.

That is why many property owners seldom go to court and use other methods to eject the squatters. Going to court is an expensive journey, especially to poor families and even to middle-income families. Oftentimes, the expenses for lawyers’ fees and other costs exceed the value of the lot being fought over.

And it is this delay that encourages squatters. Even if they are sued in court, it takes many years to decide even simple ejectment cases during which time the squatters get to enjoy and profit from the subject property without paying any rent or anything to the owner or any tax to the government.

And because of the unabated squatting, many communities decay; property prices plunge but the crime rate rises in these communities.

The worst victims of the slow wheels of justice are the detention prisoners. It takes prosecutors a long time to file the cases in court and for the judges to decide their cases, even just to grant them bail, during which time the detainees stay in crowded jails and sink deeper into criminality as they learn the “ropes” from hardened criminals in prison with them. Sometimes, they stay there for a longer period than the sentence meted out to them after conviction. And even if the detainee is acquitted, it means nothing to him because he already served time in prison.

Sometimes the culprit in the delay in the administration of justice is the Supreme Court itself. Cases are usually appealed all the way to the high court which usually takes an eternity to decide on them. Lower courts can be chastised by the Supreme Court for tardiness (but not often enough), but nobody can tell the Supreme Court itself to hurry up.

For example, the Supreme Court has not ordered the Court of Appeals to explain nor did it exert any effort to find out why eight appellate justices, one after another, inhibited themselves from a double-homicide case against an incumbent mayor in Buguey, Cagayan. The accused was elected mayor while the case against him was hibernating.

Eight, repeat eight, Court of Appeals justices inhibited themselves in as many years from a single case. Isn’t that highly unusual and irregular? Yet the Supreme Court, under different chief justices, did not even try to find out or ask the appellate court what is happening there. And during all that delay, witnesses against the accused have been murdered, or threatened or persuaded to change their testimonies.

I think one of the priorities of Chief Justice Sereno is to find out what is happening in the Court of Appeals and to punish erring justices.

Then there are the lazy and corrupt judges in the lower courts. One reason for the delay is that cases are postponed more often than they are heard. Often, the postponement is caused by the absence of the judge. Judges absent themselves without regard to the litigants and the lawyers who use up precious time and money to prepare for the hearing. They spend more time and money going to the court only to be told, when they get there, that the hearing has been postponed because the judge is absent.

But the more serious problem is corruption in the courts. Some judges can be bribed to decide cases a certain way. The trouble is although most everybody knows that the judge has been bribed, it is very difficult to prove it.

The biggest reason for the delays, of course, is the clogged court dockets. And the reason for the clogging is the lazy judges themselves and the lack of judges. Many courts are not functioning because they have no judges. Why no judges when we have an excess of lawyers? Because judges say they are not paid enough. Yet the Supreme Court itself has plenty of savings and the national government can afford to increase the budget of the judiciary.