Unequal treatment

There is no question that Arroyo should be arrested and detained for being charged with the non-bailable offense of electoral sabotage. The question however that is more important and of greater public concern is whether there are legal and factual basis for the charge. Yet this is not the question hugging the headlines and preoccupying the rest of the country for the past weeks now. It seems that people are more interested on the question merely revolving around Arroyo’s place of detention.

The place of detention became an issue here obviously because of the detainee’s stature as former president of the country. As in the Estrada case in 2001, the observation that we have a double standard of justice in this country is therefore being raised once more. It cannot really be denied that in our criminal justice system, those who have more in life and/ or, are higher in stature, have more in law especially in their treatment even as an accused. Many Filipinos really cannot understand why in other cases involving the “nobodies”, especially the poor and the lowly, there is no question anymore on whether they should be incarcerated in the ordinary jail, in their house or in the hospital. Even their state of health is not important. They are immediately clamped in the detention facilities together with the others who have also been arrested for criminal offenses. For entertaining such doubts or being unable to understand this unequal treatment, these Filipinos cannot really be blamed.

Prisoners are of two kinds, the convicts and the accused. The convicts are those who have been already tried in court and found guilty of committing crimes beyond reasonable doubt; so they are already imprisoned as a form of punishment. On the other hand, the accused are imprisoned after their arrests only because they cannot post the required bail for their release, or the crimes they are suspected of committing are non-bailable. These accused persons are still presumed innocent because they have not yet been tried and duly convicted. Hence their imprisonment is not a form of punishment but merely an assurance that they will be around for trial and possible sentencing if found guilty.

This is the situation of ex president Arroyo. She is detained because the crime she is accused of is non-bailable offense. She has to be detained until the final disposition of her case. But until then she is still presumed innocent. Hence like the deposed president Estrada who was accused of plunder, the court found nothing illegal or wrong in detaining her at a government hospital considering her stature as ex-president and the presumption of her innocence. Like Erap who was detained in a rest house with all the luxurious amenities not usually enjoyed by ordinary persons who is not even facing any charge in court, Arroyo is now detained at the Veterans Memorial Hospital suite composed of many other rooms, kitchen and toilet and bath.

But there is still an anomaly here which can really be considered as double standard of justice. It is the scandalous disparity of treatment between Arroyo and the other detainees in numerous jails throughout the country who are even charged of lesser offenses. If she could be allowed to stay in a luxurious hospital suite with several bedrooms and T&B’s, presumable well stocked with food and drinks, the government should at least also provide the other detained lesser mortals with the basic facilities like enough sleeping spaces where they could lay their head each night; it should provide the other detainees in various jails more sanitary toilets and baths than the existing one for every 250 inmates or more at a given time; it should provide these other inmates who are likewise presumed innocent decent meals fit for human consumption.

To be sure, with her present lavish accommodations, Arroyo would not mind or even try to delay or prolong her case. She indeed has the luxury of time on her side and would not feel the effects of the snail’s pace justice under our system unlike the other accused detainees in other jails with unbearable and inhuman conditions, who yearn for but could not obtain a speedier disposition of their cases.

These disparities caused by the faulty administration of justice and inadequate jail facilities and management are the reasons that render the special treatment given to ex president Arroyo and before her, to ex president Estrada, so unfair and unjust as far as other detainees like them are concerned. In fact under the kind of criminal justice system we now have, it is possible that other poor and lowly detainees who may eventually be found guilty may have already suffered the extremely inhuman conditions inside the jail longer than the sentence for the crimes they have committed; or there may be detainees who appear guiltier who may not suffer such kind of inhuman “punishment” inside these jails at all.

Hence the extraordinary concern given to the Arroyo detention facilities and the excessive media coverage surrounding it, should likewise serve as the stimulus for this administration and all the agencies involved in crime and punishment to devote equal attention and care to other detainees especially in improving the conditions inside our jails and ensuring speedier trials of their cases. All detainees, whether they have less or more in life, convicted or merely accused, should be treated equally before the law. They are all entitled to humane treatment inside the jail. After all, under our present Constitution, justice should no longer be retributive but reformative or preventive which views crime as a social phenomenon and attaches much importance to the criminal and the actor as “only a sick man who needs not to be punished but cured.

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