Shooting justice

Despite our continued exposure to an excess of high-profile or sensational crimes, the assassination of a judge still sends us reeling, still strikes us as deeply offensive. Why? Because we sense it for what it is: an attack on something fundamental, something basic, to our way of life.

We react this way even though the victim may have been a compromised judge, or one with an unfortunate reputation. This is so because of what the position of judge represents: Not merely that entire set of principles and expectations we sum up in the phrase “law and order,” but the assumption behind law itself, that it is a substitute for violence.

When violence visits the courts of law, we find ourselves disoriented.

But when the judge is someone like Reynerio Estacio Sr. of the Zamboanga Regional Trial Court, a veteran who has repeatedly passed the severest test of a judge on critical cases, a lawyer with a solid reputation in both the legal profession and in his community, the offense becomes even greater, the outrage we feel even more visceral.

The report filed by reporter Julie Alipala from Zamboanga City last Friday is as final as it is stark: “Two motorcycle-riding men shot Estacio seven times in front of his house on Narra Drive, Tugbungan village, as he was leaving for work around 7:40 a.m. Chief Insp. Felix Martinez, commander of the Tetuan police station, said Estacio was revving the engine of his car to drive off when the gunmen struck.”

Estacio’s wife, who was in the car, survived the attack unhurt.

It is possible, the station commander said, that closed-circuit camera footage may allow the police to identify the gunmen. But considering that many of the 20 or so judges killed in the last decade and a half were likely targeted by hired guns, we must consider the possibility that Estacio’s gunmen were contract killers too. This will complicate the case, and not even the immediate identification of the killers can smoothen that.

After Estacio’s murder, Chief Justice Maria Lourdes Sereno issued a strong statement, expressing “deepest outrage” over his death, calling on the police to “act swiftly” to “hold the person or persons accountable for this criminal act” and concluding with a thoughtful reflection on the meaning of the horrific crime.

“The proposition that  inter  arma  enim  silent  leges  (in the clash of arms the law is silent) is unacceptable. In order that judges may continue to be fearless and undaunted in discharging their duties of fairly, impartially and swiftly dispensing justice, they must be insulated from the violence that comes from the clash of arms. The law must speak and speak loudly so that the arms are silenced—inter leges silent arma,” she said.

Judges who do their work, making the necessary and difficult decisions in cases that impact on real lives, should not have to worry about their personal safety; the government they are a part of and the society they serve should provide them the protection they require to render judgment only according to the judicial axiom of “facts and the law.” (In other words, death threats or security concerns against their person should not form part of the facts of any case under judgment.) Sereno’s ideal of insulation—whether “from the clash of arms,” which is usually understood as times of war, or from the daily violence of ordinary conflict—can only be imperfectly realized.

Just how imperfect can be gleaned from a simple fact: Only the Supreme Court has its own security force. Judges who work in government buildings with security guards are among the lucky ones; perhaps there are more judges who work in courtrooms without adequate, or  indeed any, form of security.

The judiciary’s own limited budget is one important reason for this state of affairs. Even as the Supreme Court has recognized in recent years that the practice of designating special courts to try heinous crimes should be discontinued because it greatly increased the risk judges faced, or that resources should be provided to those judges who wish to protect themselves (either through a loan to purchase a firearm or through training workshops on how to shoot), the sheer scale of the problem is a major hurdle.

It is time for Congress to consider a special law allocating funds for the judiciary’s own security force. It may not stop gunmen on motorcycles from attacking a judge on his way to work, but it is a start.