Weak mediation rules

That front-page picture on Inquirer’s March 31 issue was truly sickening: Most of the prisoners are awaiting trials that never seem to end, while being kept in subhuman conditions, like garbage.

Where are the human rights blabbermouths?  Why are they not storming the massive gates of the Supreme Court, which seems not to give a hoot about how pathetically slow justice is in this country?

Despite my gut feeling that this may be an exercise in utter futility because the Supreme Court regards public opinion as nothing more than kibitzing, and thinks that Court alone, on its high pedestal, has the monopoly of bright ideas, may I make an unwelcome suggestion anyway? Let the people—from whom “all authority emanates”—be the judge.

This has something to do with the mediation and judicial dispute resolution (M/JDR) proceedings mandated by the Supreme Court before cases go to trial. Mediation is done before a nonjudicial officer and JDR before the judge himself—both as a last-ditch effort toward nipping the case in the bud, as it were.

Intended to make the parties settle their differences amicably and avoid time-consuming trials, those proceedings have very  low success rate. Indeed, who can argue against court trial calendars still being clogged to this day, necessitating constant postponements of hearings “for lack of material time”?

Being a party who has undergone such useless proceedings that lasted two years, it was obvious to me that the Supreme Court may have missed something. Under the current mediation rules, attempts at amicable settlement cannot go into the merits of cases, but can only appeal to the parties’ goodwill. Right there generally lies the weakness of the process.

JDR is overrated. The same appeal to goodwill is merely repeated over and over. An old adage puts it thus: “Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result is one definition of insanity.” Why can’t the judge try something else? Allowing him to make a cursory determination of the plaintiff’s complaint and the defendant’s defense should give the parties some pause and rethink their positions.

Surely, there would be some prejudgment by that judge, but that should be no problem because if no settlement is arrived at, the case is re-raffled to another judge for further proceedings and without any pre-conceived notions about the case.

My case involves collection on a promissory note. The defense is “full satisfaction of the obligation” without any receipt—because no payment was ever made. How could that case lasted more than five years—and why am I still counting? Needless to say, the faster simple cases are disposed of, the more time is saved to deal more quickly with cases affecting those prisoners wallowing in that pigsty pictured above.

CHIN CHIN KATIGBAK, cckatigbak@yahoo.com.ph