Drug list ‘the jolt’ needed to rouse judiciary

CHIEF JUSTICE Maria Lourdes Sereno reacted to  President Duterte’s making public some names on a “drug list” which included members of the judiciary (“President told: SC has sole power to discipline judges,” Front Page, 8/9/16). Like a mother hen spreading her protective wings over her chicks, Sereno made it clear that “only the Supreme Court was authorized to discipline members of the judiciary” and cautioned the judges on the drug list “against submitting themselves to investigations by the Philippine National Police.”

While, indeed, it may appear that the disclosure was premature and may unfairly expose the magistrates concerned to public ridicule and the peril of being summarily executed in Mr. Duterte’s continuing hot pursuit of drug lords and their minions, the drug list may just be the jolt the judiciary needs to break its complacency, the antidote to its arrogance. The Supreme Court should be addressing more aggressively  the unresolved issue of widespread corruption in its ranks, which is already public knowledge.

For so many years now, the public has been waiting for the result of the Supreme Court’s much-ballyhooed investigation into the shenanigans of that “Madam Arlene” who was said to be peddling temporary restraining orders and court decisions to the highest

bidder, and the involvement of trial judges, Court of Appeals and possibly Supreme Court personnel in those scams. But up to now,

nada!  Absolutely nothing has been heard about it since. To date, the scumbags are still in business!

Mr. Duterte’s counsel to all-talk-but-do-nothing public officials was wiser: Mind your own work and I will mind mine!

—CARMELA N. NOBLEJAS,

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