EDITORIAL - Justice without truth isn't justice

Wait a minute. Some people are apparently getting confused about the nature of finding justice for victims of crimes. They seem to have forgotten that truth and justice always come together. They never arrive at the end of a story completely.

Now, we can understand that as a result of immense pressure to solve crimes, law enforcers may sometimes commit mistakes. While committing mistakes in the pursuit of justice is condemnable, it is at least pardonable.

What is not pardonable is if the mistakes are committed as a result of deliberate attempts to deceive the public. And we all know that, in some instances, pressure can lead some people to pull the wool over our eyes to turn off the heat.

In fact, deception can sometimes succeed in doing just that -- relieve the pressure on authorities to come up with something to appease a demanding public. But in so doing, justice is not served. No justice is ever served if the truth is embellished or compromised.

For instance, the search for justice in the murder of assistant Cebu City prosecutor Patrick Osorio can never bear fruit if law enforcers trump up the evidence just to quiet the public grown scared by countless unsolved murders.

For instance, it has been established after the killing that the two murderers on a motorbike wore crash helmets of the kind that encloses the entire head. In fact, it was because of this established fact that calls were made to do away with such helmets.

Yet, for unexplained reasons, law enforcers followed that up with the issuance of cartographs of the supposed killers. How is that possible? How were facial descriptions of the killers obtained when nobody saw their faces?

Then there was that report about a suspect having been arrested because he had a freshly repainted motorbike of the type that matched the escape vehicle. But there are hundreds of that same type. And repaint jobs happen daily for innocent reasons.Add to this another report that a tricycle driver was made to sign a police-prepared affidavit without having duly appreciated its contents. All these bolster our nagging suspicion of an indecent haste to come up with illusory pictures of a crime solved. But is it really?