A witless decision
SEVENTEEN-YEAR-OLD Renzo Rei Bodoy, a first year college student, died after he was stabbed repeatedly by Richard Pring, 32, who grabbed his cell phone during a jeepney holdup in Quiapo, Manila.
After he was stabbed in the chest for resisting, Bodoy jumped out of the jeepney to escape further harm, but Pring followed him and stabbed him again and again.
Human rights advocates and bleeding hearts perhaps would ask people to understand the plight of Pring, who has been in and out of jail and is a member of the Batang City Jail gang.
They would probably say Pring is a victim of society’s apathy towards the poor and all that stuff about social injustice.Why should society treat a hardened criminal like Pring with compassion when he was merciless towards his victim?
In Davao City, Pring would have been executed on the spot, and residents would have rejoiced at his fate.
There should be no second chance for criminals who treat their victims without mercy.
The exceedingly slow process of putting a criminal on trial leads to an injustice—to his victim.
The axiom “justice delayed is justice denied” appears to be mainly for the accused and not his victim.
Human and constitutional rights for the accused?
What about the human and constitutional rights of his victim or victims?
* * *
The abolition of the death penalty through a presidential edict was a witless decision on the part of President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo.
Why should we show mercy to persons who plunder, kill and rape or enslave others by making them drug addicts?
Why should the government invoke humanitarian considerations for criminals but apparently show no sympathy towards crime victims through a court trial that takes so long?
Gloria’s convent school upbringing and pressure from the Catholic Church led to her decision.
Or probably back then she had a premonition that she would be put on trial for plunder and she would rather rot in prison than be hanged if she got convicted.
* * *
Prompt and commonsensical dispensation of justice deters crime and discourages would-be criminals.
This is what the vigilante group Davao Death Squad (DDS) does to hardened criminals avoiding tedious hearings.
Handling of a case using common sense, as opposed to the conviction of a quadriplegic for rape.
The Bulacan Regional Trial Court judge, Andres Soriano, who convicted the quadriplegic, and the Court of Appeals justices, who upheld the rape conviction, definitely lacked common sense.
A Supreme Court justice (his name escapes me at the moment) once said that the application of law is common sense.
In Davao City, the DDS doesn’t pick its subjects at random or whim, but chooses them like a sniper gingerly aiming at his target before deliberately squeezing the trigger.
That’s why residents applaud whenever a criminal is found dead in an isolated alley because they know he was “ripe” for the killing.
There are very few criminals in Davao City because they know their days are numbered if they continue to stay there.
* * *
The other day, a woman came to my office at Isumbong mo kay Tulfo with her 16-year-old daughter in tow.
The woman, a domestic helper, was accompanied by her female employer.
She said her husband started molesting their daughter when she was only four years old. At the age of eight, the father then started having sexual relations with the girl.
To make things worse, her uncle, the brother of her father, raped her when she was 10.
The brothers only stopped their bestial acts when their niece started menstruating at the age of 12.
Now a teenager, the victim told her mother that she could not turn to her for help then because the latter at that time was working in Manila, far from their town in the Visayas.
Her father and uncle would be likely candidates for lethal injection if President Gloria had not abolished the death penalty.
