Wednesday, October 08, 2008 Editorials: ‘Elitist’ justice
TWO challenging instances of our contemporary justice system demand a hard look.
One is the spin-off of a criminal offense that happened almost two decades ago, and the other is still an ongoing event, direly needing resolution.
The first involved a son of a former chief justice of the Supreme Court.
He shot dead for no apparent reason a 16-year old girl and one of her two male companions early one morning in 1991 in Dasmarinas Village in Makati.
This even if the girl was begging for mercy.
The case inspired later the passage of the death penalty law.
Sentenced for life, he served 16 years in prison until he was extended executive clemency by President Arroyo.
But the release of Claudio Teehankee, Jr., who is already 62 years old, has elicited protests from the civic sector,
questioning whether the President consulted the victims’ family about it.
Under our Constitution, it is within the President’s powers to grant or not clemency.
Father and son
Meanwhile, for the past number of weeks now, inhabitants of Metro Cebu has been treated to a heart-rending drama of a doting father and his son, who does not seem to possess any concern over his father’s honor.
It is clear that the perpetrators in the two instances—one already convicted and released, while the other’s case still ongoing—used the influence, and political clout of their parents within the social milieu in which they live.
It is quite difficult to make any judgment on the matter of the family upbringing of the two that somehow made them behave and act the way they did.
The only difference between the two is the level of the family’s elitism in their respective social milieu.
Family standing
But what seems obvious here is that in both cases, the respective standing of their families in the social environment they live in play a strong influence in the unraveling of their respective cases.
On the part of the former, even up to the point of the extension of presidential pardon; on the part of the latter, had it not been because the father is a city mayor, the son would have long been behind bars.
