The justice system and Mary Jane Veloso

There are stories that make us angry, stories that give us hope, and stories that leave us strangely quiet because we no longer know what emotion is appropriate. Mary Jane Veloso’s story belongs to that difficult space. For years, her name appeared in newspapers, on television, in human rights discussions, court records, diplomatic negotiations, and social media. But behind all these public conversations was a woman whose simplest wish was to come home.

In 2010, Veloso was arrested in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, after authorities found 2.6 kilograms of heroin in her luggage. She was convicted of drug trafficking and sentenced to death. She maintained that she had been deceived by recruiters and did not know that the suitcase contained drugs. In 2015, only hours before her scheduled execution, Indonesia granted a reprieve after the Philippine government asked for time to use her testimony in the trafficking case against her alleged recruiters. Her case eventually became connected to larger questions about human trafficking, migrant workers, poverty, and the limits of justice across borders.

What has troubled me most about Mary Jane’s story is not only the question of whether she was guilty or innocent. It is the larger question of what happens to a person when the machinery of justice becomes much bigger than the person standing before it. A poor Filipino woman looking for work abroad can become a case number, a prisoner, a diplomatic concern, a political issue, and eventually a symbol. Yet none of these descriptions can fully contain the life of an individual.

The law asks what happened, who carried the prohibited substance, what evidence was presented, what judgment was rendered, and what punishment should follow. Poverty asks a different question. Vulnerability asks another. Migration asks another. Human trafficking asks another. And the family waiting at home asks the most painful question of all: will the person they love ever come home? These questions do not necessarily have the same answers, which is why justice cannot be understood only through the language of punishment.

I think about poor Filipinos whenever I read about cases like this. What does justice look like when you cannot afford the best lawyer, when you do not understand the language of the court, when you are working abroad because the income available at home is not enough, and when the institutions you encounter are more powerful than anything you have ever known? We often say that everyone is equal before the law because everyone is subject to it. But equality before the law does not automatically mean equality in the ability to defend oneself within the system. A wealthy person may have greater access to time, expertise, representation, investigation, and public attention. A poor defendant may have little more than a story, a family, and the fragile hope that someone will listen. This is not an accusation against every judge, prosecutor, lawyer, or institution. It is a question about the structure surrounding them. If justice depends too heavily on resources, poverty itself can become a factor shaping how a person experiences the legal system.

Mary Jane’s story also forces us to confront the uncomfortable relationship between migration and desperation. Every year, Filipinos leave their homes because employment opportunities elsewhere seem more promising than those available locally. We celebrate them as modern heroes when they send money home, build houses, pay tuition, support parents, and keep families afloat. Yet we do not always see how vulnerable they can become to recruiters, traffickers, abusive employers, illegal placement schemes, and criminal networks. The Commission on Human Rights described Veloso’s case as a reminder of the vulnerabilities faced by migrant workers, particularly those exploited by criminal syndicates.

This makes her story larger than the question of what happened at the airport. It asks whether our country has done enough to make migration for work a genuine choice rather than a desperate necessity. It also asks whether workers are protected before something goes wrong, rather than receiving serious attention only after someone has already become a prisoner.

There is another painful dimension to the case that I cannot easily dismiss. Mary Jane remained alive after her execution was stopped so that her testimony could potentially assist the case against her alleged recruiters. She was considered an important witness, and the Supreme Court later addressed the legal mechanisms through which her testimony could be taken from Indonesia. For a human being, this is an extraordinary burden. Your life is suspended, your freedom is taken away, and your testimony becomes important to the pursuit of justice involving other people.

There is something deeply unsettling about a system in which a person who may herself have been victimized by a larger network remains imprisoned for years while institutions continue to negotiate what can be done with her story. Such circumstances may be unavoidable in complicated cases. But the fact that something is legally necessary does not mean we should stop asking whether the process can be made more humane.

When Mary Jane was transferred back to the Philippines in December 2024, she did not immediately walk into freedom. She was brought to the Correctional Institution for Women in Mandaluyong and continued serving her sentence in the Philippines under the prisoner transfer arrangement between Indonesia and the Philippines. The Commission on Human Rights welcomed her return and emphasized the importance of her dignity, rehabilitation, and reintegration into society.

That distinction matters because coming home and being free are not always the same thing. Fourteen years had passed. Children had grown. Parents had aged. Relationships had changed. Technology had transformed everyday life. The woman who left was no longer exactly the woman who returned. Freedom, therefore, has a psychological, social, and economic dimension that cannot be measured simply by the opening of a prison gate.

On September 24, 2026, President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. signed an absolute pardon for Mary Jane following years of imprisonment and after her transfer to Philippine custody. The moment is undeniably important, but I do not think the story should end with a presidential signature. A pardon can restore freedom, but it cannot return the years that have already passed. It cannot give a mother back the years she missed with her children. It cannot erase the fear of execution or automatically repair a family transformed by fourteen years of separation. It can open a door, but someone still has to help the person walk through it and learn how to live outside the walls again.

This is why I am interested not only in Mary Jane’s freedom but also in what happens after freedom. The Department of Migrant Workers has said that government assistance will include psychosocial support, livelihood assistance, skills training, and other reintegration measures for Veloso and her family. These programs matter, but they should also remind us that reintegration is not an afterthought. A person who has spent years inside a prison does not simply return to society unchanged. Freedom requires support, opportunity, and time.

Mary Jane’s case should also make us think about the migrant workers whose names never become nationally known. There are Filipinos who experience exploitation, deception, abuse, or legal trouble without attracting the attention of journalists, lawyers, human rights advocates, or government officials. Their stories may never become international cases. Their families may struggle quietly. Their suffering may remain invisible. Justice should not become more compassionate simply because a person’s story has become famous.

I keep returning to one uncomfortable question. If Mary Jane had been born into a wealthy family, would her journey through the justice system have looked exactly the same? We cannot answer that with certainty, and it would be irresponsible to invent an alternative history. But we can ask what resources were available to her, what protections existed for migrant workers like her, how accessible legal assistance was to poor Filipinos, and whether our justice system adequately recognizes the unequal circumstances from which many defendants enter it.

This does not mean that poor people should be exempt from the law. It means that the law must remain capable of seeing the person behind the accusation. A justice system that sees only the offense but not the circumstances surrounding vulnerability may become efficient without necessarily becoming humane.

Perhaps this is the sadness at the heart of Mary Jane Veloso’s story. She became known to millions of Filipinos because she was almost executed, yet what she wanted was painfully ordinary. She wanted to work. She wanted to earn. She wanted to provide for her family. She wanted to come home. These are not extraordinary dreams. They are the dreams of millions of Filipinos who leave their provinces, cross seas, board airplanes, sign contracts, trust recruiters, and enter unfamiliar countries because the opportunities at home are not enough.

We often call their sacrifices heroic. But we should also ask why so many people have to risk so much simply to build a life that should not be impossible to build in their own country.

This is where the justice system must meet the rest of society. Justice does not begin inside a courtroom. It begins much earlier, in the conditions that determine who becomes vulnerable, who can be deceived, who has access to legal assistance, and who can seek help when something goes wrong. Courts have their rules. Prosecutors have their duties. Lawyers have their obligations. Governments have diplomatic responsibilities. But society also has a responsibility to examine the conditions that repeatedly place vulnerable people in danger.

If we punish only the person carrying the suitcase while ignoring the network that recruits, deceives, transports, and profits from vulnerable workers, we may be addressing the final link in a chain without confronting the chain itself.

I do not know whether Mary Jane’s pardon gives us closure, and I am not sure that it should. Some stories should remain slightly uncomfortable because discomfort can force us to remember what celebration makes us forget. We can welcome her home and still ask difficult questions. We can recognize the government’s diplomatic efforts while examining the failures that allowed a vulnerable migrant worker to become trapped in such an ordeal. We can respect the authority of the courts while continuing to ask whether our justice systems adequately protect those with the fewest resources.

We can also recognize the seriousness of drug trafficking while acknowledging that human trafficking, illegal recruitment, and economic desperation can complicate the stories of people caught in the machinery of criminal justice. These are not necessarily contradictory positions. They are part of what it means to take justice seriously.

Mary Jane Veloso is home now, and that matters. But perhaps the most meaningful response to her story is not simply to celebrate that she survived. It is to ask what we will change so that another poor Filipino woman does not have to endure the same ordeal before we remember that she is human.

If justice is truly for everyone, it must reach beyond the courtroom and beyond the prison gate. It must reach the worker who leaves because there is no decent livelihood at home, the family that borrows money to send someone abroad, the child who waits for a parent who may not return, and the ordinary citizen who has no powerful surname, no political influence, and no money to make the system move faster.

Because when you are poor in this country, the frightening question is not simply whether you have committed a crime. Sometimes, the more frightening question is whether anyone with power will listen when you say you did not.

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Noel Galon de Leon is a writer and professor at the University of the Philippines Visayas, where he teaches in the Division of Professional Education and at UP High School in Iloilo. He is also the Secretary of the National Commission for Culture and the Arts-National Committee on Literary Arts.