EDITORIAL - Whose side is Jimenez on?

Dante Jimenez of the Volunteers Against Crime and Corruption has to watch his words when commenting about the incident at the Palace of Justice in Cebu City in which Canadian John Pope shot dead two people, wounded another, got hit by responding police, then shot himself.

The last thing anyone wants is for people who know nothing about the case to just fly in one morning from out of nowhere and begin making comments in the afternoon about a case all of whose facts they still need to gather and appreciate.

No one is stopping Jimenez from gathering his own information about the case. But he should not have publicly declared his regrets about not having met Pope when he was still alive, thereby implying that he saw merit in the allegations Pope made known to him in a letter.

The most Jimenez should have done was to acknowledge receipt of the letter and the allegations it contained without expressing his personal sentiments about unproven allegations as this can be mistaken as an indication of where his heart chose to lay in just so short a time.

Jimenez making personal comments about a case whose background he could not have appreciated in a visit of just a few hours tends to throw the full weight of the VACC behind a person who is not the victim but is the perpetrator of a ghastly crime.

Whether or not Pope indeed suffered injustice still remains to be seen. What is the undisputable fact here is a doctor and a lawyer are dead and a fiscal critically wounded. And that is far more important than what may have driven Pope, which is still debatable at best.

What is Jimenez trying to do? That Pope cried injustice in his letters does not necessarily and automatically make him a victim of injustice. What Jimenez does not know but that all Cebuanos do is that Pope had created his own personal measure of what justice is.

To Pope, justice was not justice if it didn’t measure up to his personal understanding of what justice is. He never accepted unfavorable decisions and sued those who handed them. True, there are those who said he loved children. But doesn’t that make him all the more, er, complex?

The most important thing Jimenez must understand is this: Even granting that Pope was indeed a victim of injustice, that still does not justify what he did. So if Jimenez has anything to do at all, he should do it quietly instead of drawing attention to himself and what he thinks.