sanchez, the senate, and the supremes

not surprised that convicted rapist-killer antonio sanchez had his family lobbying hard for his release by whatever means.  plan A: win a grant of clemency from president duterte through the intercession of imeldific political ally, imelda marcos herself, among other luminaries, helped along by his former legal counsel, now presidential spokesman sal panelo’s FYI (for-your-info) to the bureau of pardons and parole (BPP).  but, of course, now that the shit has hit the fan, panelo and imee marcos (for imelda) say their offices are swamped by letters of request for this and that, and everything is simply forwarded / referred to the offices concerned.  really?  no sifting the grain from the chaff, the valid from the invalid, the bongga from the  basura?  walang due diligence?

plan B: avail of the Good Conduct Time Allowance (GCTA) law that the good senators of the 15th congress so conveniently enacted in 2013, and in such ambiguous terms that even an unrepentant sanchez just might qualify, and he almost did, thanks also to the it-would-seem just-as ambiguous implementing rules and regulations (IRR) crafted by then DOJ sec, now detained senator, leila de lima and then DILG sec mar roxas.  in the first senate hearing DOJ sec menardo guevara didn’t beat around the bush:  the law is not clear and needs to be amended.  read Guevara wants GCTA law amended amid controversy.

Guevarra’s proposed amendments include a clear classification of whether the law should be on reformative and rehabilitative side, or punitive or retributive, and clear definition of “heinous crimes.”

“We came to a conclusion that the intent of the law was to exclude those convicted of heinous crimes, as well as habitual delinquents, escapists, recidivists. But that came only after a tedious and laborous harmonization of the various provisions of this law,” he said.

“Had it been clearly stated in one single provision — stand alone provision — that the benefits of this law shall not apply to these classes of people, then we’ll probably not have a conclusion such as what we have now,” he added.

so.  sino nga ba ang mga senador na ito ng 15th congress who are, at bottom, responsible for the crappy GCTA law.  philstar‘s jess diaz did the research and found that some senators who have been holding forth in the senate hearings, fuming now over the almost-release of sanchez, are among the law’s authors.  such as senators frank drilon, ping lacson, bong revilla, francis pangilinan, and tito sotto.  read ‘Expanded good conduct law was Senate idea’.

Senate Bill 3064 was contained in Committee Report No. 82, which the committee on justice and human rights, and the committee on constitutional amendments, revision of codes and laws submitted on Nov. 17, 2011.

The Senate version consolidated eight similar measures on counting the period of detention as part of a prison term and expansion of GCTA as provided in the Revised Penal Code.

The authors of the eight measures were then senators Manuel Villar Jr., Francis Escudero and Miriam Defensor Santiago.

Villar, Escudero, Santiago, and colleagues Loren Legarda, Antonio Trillanes IV, Franklin Drilon, Ramon Revilla Jr., Sergio Osmeña III, Francis Pangilinan, Aquilino Pimentel III, Ferdinand Marcos Jr., Panfilo Lacson, Manuel Lapid, Alan Peter Cayetano, the late Joker Arroyo and Edgardo Angara, Jinggoy Estrada, Teofisto Guingona III and Vicente Sotto III signed Report No. 82.

the four who did not sign: then senate prez juan ponce enrile, senators gregorio honasan, ralph recto, and pia cayetano. it would be interesting to hear why not. did they think it was badly crafted?  did they perhaps foresee that the likes of the incorrigible antonio sanchez could take advantage of the ambiguities?  or did they share marcos sol-gen estelito mendoza’s opinion that the GCTA law undercuts sentences handed down by courts?

Mendoza told senators in Thursday’s hearing that the GCTA, a law enacted in 2013 to fast-track the release of well-behaved convicts and decongest the country’s jails, could create a constitutional crisis.

… “Once rendered, it ( a sentence) is not subject to change. It is immutable. It must be implemented and rendered as executed by the court,” said Mendoza..

“If the congress which grants excessive time allowance which undercuts the judgments of courts, that might be subject to constitutional question because of our basic principle of separation of powers,” said Mendoza.

read also philstar columnist alex magno’s Sloppy.

The good conduct time allowance law, being so sloppily crafted, allows bureaucrats a wide margin of discretion. That is, we know, always bad.

The vulnerability of any bureaucratic unit to corruption correlates with the width of the margin of discretion of its bureaucrats. This is why administrative reforms in the BIR and the Customs Bureau focus on reducing the margin of discretion and increasing transparency of transactions.

The badly crafted good conduct time allowance law, aggravated by even worse crafted implementing rules and regulations, is more than an invitation to corruption. It is an invitation to an orgy.

It is not surprising that early releases of prisoners have become commodities for sale to the highest bidders. The bigger the bribe, the more expeditious the processing.

clearly, sanchez was trying to buy his way to freedom, one crooked way or another, and without paying up the php12 million plus owed the sarmenta and gomez families, as ruled by the supreme court.  i wonder what the supremes have to say about that.

by the way, di ko gets ang prescriptive period of 10 years, which i am willing to assume is meant to favor the victims’ families – they shouldn’t have to wait longer than that? – but what if it turns out to favor instead the convicted rapist-killer who dares defy the supremes and refuses to pay?

di ko rin gets kung bakit hindi napilit, na-obliga, na-compel si sanchez na magbayad, never mind his continued protestations of innocence.  hindi daw siya, si kit alqueza daw ang mastermind sa pagpatay kay gomez; later, si allan jun sanchez daw, anak niyang kauuwi from london studies ang niregaluhan ng eileen, or so says mon tulfo who heard it first from a “prison official” na inuutangan daw ni sanchez para sa nurse who visited him regularly for his health na nabuntis daw niya.  yeah, it gets murkier and sleazier by the day.

so, whose responsibility was it to make sure that the supremes’ ruling was executed?  the executive branch?  or the judicial branch?  both of the above?  senator drilon is right: it is not for the DOJ to invoke the lapsed prescriptive period.  let the DOJ file a case and let the supremes decide.  i’d love to hear “prescriptive periods” defended when it works in favor of the convicted criminal instead.  i wonder what marcos sol-gen estelito mendoza would say about that.

and here’s hoping that former senator juan ponce enrile also weighs in; after all he was the senate prez when that slapdash slipshod law was passed.  and he sure could use the pogi points, too.

a ninoy aquino book

i’ve been writing a ninoy book for a year now.  working title: The life and the death of Ninoy Aquino / A timeline 1932 -1983.

i only meant to come up with a simpler shorter version of EDSA Uno (2013) upon the request of  high school teachers.  maybe four slim volumes, one per day, that students could pass around.  and a first volume, of course, to quickly introduce the main players—marcos  and imelda, ninoy and cory, enrile and ramos—setting the stage for february 1986 and People Power.

it was easy enough coming up with quick factual timelines of ferdinand’s and imelda’s lives, the milestones pre-EDSA being well-documented and pretty much public knowledge, never mind the marcos revisionism.  the opposite is true, however, of ninoy’s life.

except for the broad strokes—major milestones marking the road to martyrdom at age 50—much of ninoy’s narrative has yet to be told from beginning to end in one go, particularly where it clarifies his radical relations with the left that had marcos tagging him a communist sympathizer; where it delves into the pain of imprisonment and the military trial that convicted him to death; and where it tells of ninoy’s last three years, what he was up to in America, and why he decided to come home when he did.

Like Marcos, the 50-year-old Aquino was a complex, contradictory figure who was in flesh-and-blood quite different from the devotee of Gandhian non-violence into which some sectors of the Philippine opposition are now converting him for their own political ends. But of one thing there is no dispute: Aquino was a profoundly courageous man. It was this streak of stubborn courage that earned him a death sentence in 1977, after five years of imprisonment had failed to extract from him a pledge of allegiance to Marcos. And it was this courage, wedded to a driving ambition and a deep concern for the strategic interests of his class, that propelled Aquino toward his appointment with history that dog-day afternoon of 21 August. ~ Walden Bello (1984)

going on four decades later, ninoy is being dismissed as just another ambitious politician who came home from exile and died on the tarmac, and so he became a hero, because he died on the tarmac.  and what about daw his non-record as a senator—twice elected and not a single law attributed to him.  and who daw cares about EDSA now, now that the marcoses are back anyway, and the color yellow has lost its glow, no thanks to the color-blind who choose to see red instead.

meanwhile a young academic has played up ninoy’s role in the birthing of the CPP/NPA brand (as though ka dante and joma would not have met but for ninoy); he has also expressed serious doubt in ninoy’s denial that he was ever a communist because daw ninoy did not live to define his terms.

thing is, ninoy did, define his terms, in Testament from a Prison Cell (1984) and it’s surprising that the young scholar seemed to not know of this primary source.  well, maybe it’s cory’s fault.  post-EDSA, ninoy’s political views were never spoken about, much less discussed, or ever referred to for guidance.  i suppose because cory had her hands full fending off rightist pretenders to the throne; better to play it by ear than to invoke ninoy, because then they’d have pounced and screamed “communist!” too.

in fact ninoy was no communist, no anti-imperialist, for sure.  but he admitted to being a keen student of theoretical marxism, following every twist and turn of local communists, reading practically all the published works of local reds, and interviewing communist intellectuals for first-hand information every chance he got.  in fact, he was a christian social democrat who sought to “harmonize political freedom with social and economic equality, taking the best of the primary conflicting systems—communism and capitalism.” [Testament from a Prison Cell 30-31]

and so a book on ninoy muna, for the record.  nothing quick or sketchy, rather more detailed than usual, in a timeline format that is reader-friendly and easy to add to, delete from, or re-arrange for fine-tuning.

it starts with a quick run through grandfather servillano’s and father benigno’s stories, because patterns repeat.  whenever possible, i let ninoy tell his own story while accommodating too the voices of family and friends, critics and enemies, and local and global media through the years.

sources are cited religiously in tracking his climb and claim to national consciousness as well as his politics and worldview as it evolved from magsaysay to marcos times and from imprisonment in fort bonifacio to exile in america, until he decided it was time to go back home, face death in manila, than be run over, accidentally or not, by a boston taxicab.

happy ninoy aquino day!

U.P. calls out senator bato

i grew up in a convent school, was 16 when i went to UP diliman in 1966.  some friends and family were surprised, if not shocked, at my parents.  but U.P. is RED! they said, or pink at the very least, one conceded.  but i hadn’t applied anywhere else and four more years of st. scho was just unthinkable, i wasn’t sure why, until U.P., where i realized how ill-prepared i was for U.P.’s kind of rigorous thinking, no spoon-feeding, sink or swim, hippies, gays, activists, all.

THE BATTLE FOR HEARTS AND MINDS
Randy David

… I don’t expect President Duterte or Sen. Bato dela Rosa to feel comfortable around UP students. No one who is used to exercising absolute authority, to being obeyed without question, will ever feel at ease dealing with someone with a critical mind. To the latter, every idea is open to doubt; you can’t invoke rank to win an argument. In matters of thought, the only force that a critical mind accepts is the force of the better argument.

The best universities have always been those that not only create and transmit cutting-edge knowledge, but also fulfill functions that strengthen democratic culture. “[T]he university has always fulfilled a task that is not easy to define,” writes the sociologist Jurgen Habermas; “today we would say that it forms the political consciousness of its students.”

Whether they are aware of it or not, parents take a great risk when they send their children to universities that consciously promote and preserve the liberal milieu of learning. If they are bright and conscientious, these youths will return to their families as transformed human beings, worthy not only of their parents’ name but also of the nation that paid for their education. One will know them by the type of questions they ask. In UP, we call this badge of honor “Tatak UP.”

As a parent myself and, more recently, as a grandparent to a UP student, I am not immune to the worries that all UP parents are heir to, even as I have lived almost all my life in this university. I try to keep in step with the young by engaging them in meaningful conversation, constantly reminding myself of Kahlil Gibran’s words: “Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself. They come through you but not from you, and though they are with you yet they belong not to you.”

public.lives@gmail.com

When whimsy, not transport science, dictates traffic policies

Marlen V. Ronquillo

There  is a traffic plan for  Manhattan’s 14th Street in New York City, easily the borough’s most congested road. The New York  City government is coordinating with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) to carry out  the plan.

And it is a direct assault on America’s much-cherished  car culture.

The plan,  so far the most radical assault on America’s beloved cars, would ban all cars from the 14th. Only three types of vehicles would be allowed — buses, trucks carrying food and other essentials and emergency vehicles.

Read on…