Fruit vendor meted life for selling shabu

A fruit vendor in barangay Lagtang, Talisay City was sentenced yesterday to life imprisonment for selling five small packs of shabu. He is also fined P800,000.

Aside from the verdict given, Regional Trial Court judge Gabriel Ingles imposed 15 more years of incarceration to Arnold Tabuzo who was found guilty beyond reasonable doubt for violating the Comprehensive Dangerous Drugs Law.

Elements of the Philippine Drugs Enforcement Agency testified they arrested Tabuzo during a buy-bust operation they conducted in Lagtang on September 8, 2004 when he sold the five packs of shabu in the amount of P1,000 to P02 Goduardo Gamit who acted as poseur buyer.

Tabuzo tried to destroy the credibility of the police officers by saying that they arrested him just because he failed to reveal the names of drug pushers operating in their place.

He even presented a 10-year-old boy before the witness stand to support his claim that the police arrested him without his doing anything illegal, but the court rejected Tabuzo's alibis.

"This court cannot believe that the arresting officers falsely charged the accused for three serious offenses simply because he did not tell them the identities of drug peddlers in the area," Ingles ruled.

According to Ingles, if the police were in the place merely to harass individuals to extract information from them on drug peddlers, then why is it that the other persons - including Tabuzo's two defense witnesses - were not harassed?

At first, Tabuzo was hesitant to sell shabu because he is not familiar with the buyer, but because of the assurance of a civilian asset that the buyer is a "good person", Tabuzo was convinced to sell him the shabu.

After he was arrested for selling the five packs of shabu, three more packs were seized from his pocket, and some rolled tin foils and a lighter, which police referred to as paraphernalia for sniffing shabu.

But Ingles dismissed the third case for possession of lighter and tin foils because he did not consider them as drug paraphernalia. - Rene U. Borromeo