Selective justice

By Alex P. Vidal

“There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest.” – Elie Wiesel

WE are not against the the decision of the Ombudsman to file plunder case against loquacious Senator Rodante Marcoleta for we believe he, like any public official who violates the law, deserves his day in court.

What is perplexing is his case was expedited ahead of those involved in the irritating multi-billion pesos flood control project scam, the 60 congressmen and several senators in the 19^th congress, who became multimillionaires if not billionaires at the expense of the taxpayers.

Before the Marcoleta donnybrook, there were reports investigators were reexamining anywhere from eight to 15 specific congressmen for direct involvement in illegal contracting and kickback schemes related to flood control projects, while up to 45 to 67 lawmakers across the 19th Congress have been broadly implicated or investigated for conflicts of interest in the scandal that rocked the Philippines the last time President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. delivered his SONA a year ago.

What happened to the cases of those crooks in the House of Representatives and the Senate?

-o0o-

How about some subalterns of the President who had been implicated earlier in the testimonies of DPWH bigwigs who are also in hot water?

Was the Iglesia Ni Kristo (INK), which staged a tumultuous and wicked rally in EDSA recently, correct when they decried this administration’s “selective justice?”

The INK rally may have been unpopular due to the terrible inconvenience it created in public, but if we lend our ears to what this religious group has been bellyaching regarding selective justice, we can conclude they deserved attention from the government, especially the Department of Justice (DoJ).

Selective justice is really unfair, a biased application of the law because apparently in the cases of Marcoleta and other controversial political figures now in the dumps, authorities like the DoJ and the Office of the Ombudsman apparently enforce rules, prosecute crimes, or hand out punishments based on personal advantage, political motives, or discriminatory prejudices rather than true impartiality.

It will undermine the rule of law and create a system where the powerful, like Martin Romualdez, et al, evade accountability by virtue of their being presumed to be “inside the kulambo.”

-o0o-

To successfully claim that a specific case involves this unequal treatment (often challenged in court as “selective prosecution”), legal professionals must prove that demonstrating that similar individuals outside the targeted group were not prosecuted for the same conduct.

Also showing that the selection was intentionally based on race, religion, gender, or political alignment, rather than the facts of the crime.

When laws are enforced disproportionately against vulnerable communities or political opposition, systems of impartial justice break down.

It transforms the legal system into a tool for oppression rather than an instrument of fairness.

(The author, who is now based in New York City, used to be the editor-in-chief of two leading daily newspapers in Iloilo, Philippines.—Ed)