Editorial
Criminal misconduct
WITH THE Supreme Court having made short shrift of the testimony of Jessica Alfaro in the Vizconde massacre case, the onus has shifted from the convicted and now recently released Hubert Webb et al. to the National Bureau of Investigation’s star witness. As early as Tuesday this week, only hours after the promulgation of the Court’s ruling and at the very moment when TV cameras were recording Webb’s last moments inside prison before his eventual release, the news anchors on the ABS-CBN news channel were already breathlessly speculating on the possible criminal accountability of Alfaro for her tainted testimony.
While to much of the polarized public, the jury on the guilt or innocence of Webb and his co-accused may still be out, there is one element of this sordid, sorry saga that has been made crystal-clear by the Court’s re-examination of the case: the culpability of the NBI in bungling the case. It is a culpability of the shocking, brazen, criminal kind, of which the employment of Alfaro as a dubious witness was only the most disturbing part. In this sprawling enterprise of evidence destroyed or gone missing, witnesses threatened and mishandled, multiple arrests that led nowhere—with suspects invariably crying torture, and fanciful stories planted in the public mind to jam the facts into a clumsy theory—one could see a horrifying picture of a law-enforcement agency practically gone off its ethical rocker, unmoored from any sense of professional, legal or moral constraints in prosecuting the case.
Even as public attention has now turned on Alfaro and questions about the extent of her probable perjury, it must also be asked: Who deployed her and coached her to be the star witness for the state? Who concocted the elaborate story that tried to stitch together various elements of the horrific crime into a plausible whole—plausible enough to have convinced Parañaque Regional Trial Court Judge Amelita Tolentino to convict Webb et al. overwhelmingly on its basis—but which the high court has now trashed as essentially ridiculous and unreliable?And who destroyed or mislaid crucial evidence, such as the semen samples taken from the body of Carmela Vizconde? The NBI says it sent them as evidence to Tolentino’s sala, a claim the court denies. This exasperating back-and-forth alone deserves the gravest censure, or at least a thorough investigation, from both the Department of Justice, which oversees the NBI, and the Supreme Court, which has jurisdiction over the Parañaque court. Losing evidence is no laughing matter; losing evidence in this case, the most high-profile crime in the country in so many years, is nothing short of heinous.
Running after Alfaro should be secondary to bearing down on the shadowy figures among the police and NBI ranks who, by their incompetence, negligence and/or deliberate conspiracy to manipulate the case, perpetrated a most outrageous injustice—both against Lauro Vizconde whose fate it is now to relive the horrors all over again; and against Webb et al. who had to waste 15 years in jail for a crime they might not have been guilty of.This is not the first time the NBI and the police have dropped the ball on basic criminal procedures. Too many cases have been dismissed because of legal shortcuts taken, or evidence planted or lost, or victims’ human rights violated. Other than clapping handcuffs on suspects, the country’s law enforcers, it is clear, are woefully, dangerously inadequate in their jobs. But the enormity of the Vizconde massacre threatens to make this moment the most spectacular failure in these organizations’ history so far.
Within six months, the statute of limitations on the Vizconde murders will preclude further criminal proceedings. Instead of launching another investigation that could only raise false hopes and pressure authorities to rely on ever-flimsier evidence, Malacañang and the DOJ should instead see this time as an opportunity to strengthen the rule of law within the NBI and the Philippine National Police.
These agencies’ investigative capabilities and, more crucially, grounding in the legal requirements of criminal prosecution should be overhauled and made a primary basis for their accountability to the public they purport to serve. Leave them be as they are now, without punishment for their criminal misconduct in the Vizconde case, and more bungling is bound to happen—if it isn’t happening now.
