The drug war’s other front

EDITORIAL

MUCH has been said about the government’s anti-drug war, which has claimed the lives of thousands of drug suspects.

The high death toll has alarmed human rights groups, but President Rodrigo Duterte sees this as a necessary consequence of protecting non-drug users from pushers and addicts and their criminal ways.

But data from the Justice department and the Supreme Court show that the government is losing the drug war on another key front—the courts.

Records from the National Prosecution Service show that the number of drug cases that prosecutors filed has shot up almost ten-fold, from only 7,675 in 2009 to 70,706 in 2017, Rappler reported. 

But from 2016 to 2017, only about half of these cases ended with a conviction—50.2 percent in 2016 and 52.5 percent in 2017. This compares poorly with the prosecution success rate for other crimes—rebellion and violations of intellectual property rights at 100 percent, illegal gambling at 96.3 percent, murder at 86.6 percent, robbery at 86.5 percent and homicide at 85.4 percent.

Just as troubling, courts dismissed 5,720 out of 70,706 drug cases outright, or about 7.4 percent of all those filed.

Justice Secretary Menardo Guevarra says often, the reasons are technical, such as failure to observe procedural requirements, including those on the chain of custody of seized drugs.

In an interview with the Judicial and Bar Council, Associate Justice Diosdado Peralta admitted that the courts cannot keep up with the volume of drug cases. “We are failing in drug cases,” he said.

“It is humanly impossible to come up with a termination of a criminal case when you start the counting of period from the filing of information.”

Peralta said when judges schedule trial dates when respondents are arraigned, they schedule six to seven cases for hearing on the same day, when they can actually only hear three.

In 2016, ousted chief justice Maria Lourdes Sereno assigned hundreds of drug courts in response to the war on drugs.

The low rate at which drug suspects are convicted, however, gives us pause to wonder if this was the correct way to go. Certainly, more action is required, perhaps in terms of better training for judges and prosecutors and a review of speedy trial rules in drug-related cases.

Chief Justice Teresita Leonardo-de Castro, who only has less than two months in office, may not be able to do too much in the time left to her, but she can still initiate discussions on reforms that would bolster this vulnerable front in the war on drugs.