Judiciary in a moral crisis

How ironic that a “court holiday” was declared at a time when justice was needed more than ever. I didn’t know that propriety and service to the people can take the backseat to the ceaseless pursuit of power. I guess that is what nine years of impunity can do even to a country’s supposedly last bastion of hope.

The Filipino who is worth dying for is not even worth the time of justices and court employees. Where were these justices when Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo appointed Renato Corona as chief magistrate when it was clearly against the law? Now they have the gall to warn the people of an impending constitutional crisis when they themselves looked away when the very Constitution they are now claiming to defend was being destroyed by appointments done in the witching hours of the Arroyo administration.

No matter how much we deny it, our justice system is only for those who can afford justice. Victims who cannot afford to buy a dictionary to look up the terms “technicality” and “loophole” end up losing their cases. Victims whose wives and daughters get raped and massacred taste justice only for a little while and only until the asking price of those who decide on the merits of the case are met.

Time and time again, victims who go against the powerful, connected and brazen end up six feet under the ground (or maybe two feet if the backhoe operator is not that skilled in disposing of bodies) while murderers go scot-free to rig more elections. All this while a lawyer literally offers his balls to the Filipino people, a congresswoman cries foul because the same tactics she devised in the past against her enemies are now used against her; and judges and lawyers hold a court holiday at the expense of a juvenile delinquent who is held one more day in the same prison cell where murderers are king, or of laid-off airport personnel who have been waiting for justice for 30 long years, or of a wife of a slain journalist whose only mistake was to tell the truth in a world where lies are tolerated.

Corona’s impeachment and the speed at which it was executed may be suspect, but his lack of moral ascendancy is not. The motives behind the impeachment may be political in nature, but to deny Corona what is not his to begin with, is essentially a moral issue.

The letter of the law says Corona deserves his day in court. The spirit of the law says he should not be in the high court in the first place. Thus, the court holiday was wrong because it was a declaration of loyalty to one man while spitting on the faces of the people, especially those whose fight for justice cannot and must not wait for another day.

I used to believe that those who have less in life should have more in law, that the preferential treatment for the poor is not simply a spiritual mandate to be more Christian but a universal call to be more human. This is the truth that our justices, in defending a fake chief justice, have overruled. Forget constitutional crisis, this is a Judiciary lost in its own moral crisis.

—JAMES MICHAEL QUIZON,

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