EDITORIAL - No protection

It’s hard enough to find people willing to testify in a criminal case. The witness must be on call throughout the trial, which in this country could take years. To destroy the credibility of the testimony, defense lawyers could attempt to malign the reputation of the witness. And if the accused happens to be influential, the witness may be harassed and threatened with physical harm. Key witnesses have been kidnapped or murdered while some have been paid off and sent abroad. Others have simply disappeared.

To encourage witnesses to come out, many governments have witness protection programs. Witnesses stay in a safehouse, often with their loved ones, move around with bodyguards, get a stipend from the government and sometimes get a new identity. Now witnesses in this country have something else to worry about, apart from their safety. A woman under the Witness Protection Program of the Department of Justice has accused her guard, Gerry Lintan, of raping her in the safehouse she shared with her relatives and another family.

Lintan, also known as Rustom Yap, claimed he was having an affair with the woman. This is possible, but in a society where rape victims bear a stigma, why would a married woman with a four-year-old daughter open herself and her family to embarrassment by going public about being raped? The woman, who denied the affair, pointed out that she had told other people in the safehouse about Lintan making passes at her. She had tried to laugh it off, she said, until she was raped.

Rapists in this country go to the lethal injection chamber. More so if the rapist is a person tasked to protect the victim. That aggravating circumstance should make the rape a non-bailable offense. Instead director Leo Dacera of the Witness Protection Program, upon hearing the woman’s complaint, reportedly sent Lintan to the Cordilleras. That may be an undesirable posting for a WPP guard, but it gives an accused rapist all the opportunity to flee. Now the latest word is that Lintan has been suspended indefinitely. But where is he? If the justice department can’t even lock up one of its own men who is accused of a serious offense, it’s no longer surprising that the country has runaway criminality.