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Monday, October 23, 2006
Seares: What is right with Tolentino
By Pachico A. Seares
News Sense
WHAT is wrong with Alex Tolentino, Integrated Bar of the Philippines (IBP) Cebu City chapter president, is mostly public perception.
To the public:
-- He made it appear his fight against serial murders was a lawyers’ group effort and yet he often acted alone;
-- He talked too much too soon, making claims he didn’t deliver, when all he had was “credible but raw information”;
-- He flip-flopped, saying something in one news moment, revising it in the next;
-- He made us doubt he practiced law: when he said lawyers don’t evaluate evidence, was he kidding?
Lawyers who can’t distinguish evidence from rumor do notarial work on the sidewalk or run a radio talk show.
Vigilante inspirers like Mayor Tomas Osmeña ridiculed Alex and IBP and their skill in filing a case in court.
He spoke out
But there’s something enormously right with Alex.
He spoke out against summary executions that killed illegally more people in two years than the justice system legally killed in decades.
How many lawyers, schooled in values of due process and criminal justice system, have kept quiet while those values are defiled?
Who are the churchgoers who condemned butchery and cheapening of human life that unsolved murders signify?
Alex has done what most of us still have to find courage to do.
A pity that fumbling and fibbing obscure the heroic in Alex’s advocacy.
But criticize the man, not the cause.
For Bisaya stories from Cebu. Click here. (October 23, 2006 issue)
Write letter to the editor.Click here.
Join the Sun.Star message board.Click here.
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