14 years of waiting

Guilty. That was the verdict against the kidnappers of five-year-old Eunice Chuang and her 27-year-old nanny Jovita Montecino, who were abducted and subsequently found dead in 2000. Guilty beyond reasonable doubt—for which taxi driver Monico Santos, the principal suspect, was sentenced to life imprisonment, and his cousin and accomplice, Francis Canoza, to 10-15 years.

Justice at last? Hardly. While the case appears for all purposes a successfully prosecuted one, its backstory says a lot about the troubling deficiencies that plague the Philippine justice system. “Scandalous” is quite mild a term to describe the convoluted, highly unsatisfactory path the Chuang case had taken before it was able to reach its rightful end.

It took all of 14 years to try the case, four judges to hear the evidence, and six deferments of the verdict’s promulgation before Chuang’s family could claim some degree of closure and finality to their ordeal.

Teresita Ang See, founding chair of the Movement for Restoration of Peace and Order, an advocacy group composed of the families of kidnap-for-ransom victims, said that of all the cases the MRPO was handling, the Chuang case broke records.

“This is the longest trial that we have ever seen in our organization,” she said.

How did that happen? “The first judge, Amalia Andrade, retired before she could finish hearing the case,” Inquirer reporter Nathaniel R. Melican quoted Ang See as saying. “Judge Jansen Rodriguez took over, only to note that the prosecution was no longer presenting rebuttal evidence. Judge Amor Reyes took over, and then Acting Presiding Judge Mona Lisa Tiongson-Tabora followed, until in 2013, when current Presiding Judge Emily San Gaspar-Gito was assigned here. However, it was agreed that, in order to avoid further delays in the disposition of the case, Judge Tabora will be the one to issue the decision in the case.”

That concise and clinical recounting should not obscure the fact that, in real life, the process was maddening and excruciating for the Chuangs, who, in addition to the grief they had to bear for their lost daughter, suffered the indignity—and the very real costs—of having to put up with an inept, delinquent justice system.

And it’s a case, one might note, that looked open-and-shut from the very beginning. When Eunice and Montecino disappeared on Oct. 17, 2000, after boarding a taxi, the police didn’t take long to find clues and arrest the suspects. The taxi, driven by Santos, was hired by the Chuangs to take their daughter and her nanny to and from the Philippine San Bin School in Binondo, Manila. On that day, Eunice’s grandmother testified that she saw another man get into the taxi—later identified as Santos’ cousin and coaccused, Canoza.

When police visited Santos at his home in Malolos, Bulacan, they made a grisly find: Eunice and Montecino were hidden in the ceiling of the house, gagged and tied, and already dead from suffocation. Santos would later confess to the crime: He kidnapped the child, he said, in exchange for P300,000, so he could repair his house.

In the end, the decision on the case, promulgated by Tabora of the Manila Regional Trial Court Branch 5, took all of 17 pages. That was how straightforward the case was—or should have been. But announcing that decision alone netted a record six postponements: in October 2012, in January 2013, and this year, on May 20, May 30, June 27 and Dec. 19. By the time the judge’s decision was read, more than 14 years had passed. Eunice would have been 19 by now, and Montecino, 41.

Guilty verdict notwithstanding, the judiciary doesn’t have much to be proud of in this case. The inordinate delays and distractions burdened the victims’ families twice over, and also highlighted the rot and inefficiency of the system. Coming on the heels of the outrageous news that three Sandiganbayan justices had attempted to shirk their sworn duty by withdrawing from the plunder and graft cases they were handling against detained Sen. Jinggoy Estrada, all for uniform but unspecified “personal reasons,” one is led to conclude that the judiciary needs as much rehabilitation and housecleaning these days as the two other, frequently more criticized, branches of government, the executive branch and the legislature.

If the Chuang case is any basis, the verdict should be guilty as well on the local courts for their failure to dispense justice promptly and diligently.