In August 1999, five men, known as the “Abadilla Five”, received the death sentence by a Regional Trial Court (RTC) in Quezon City, Manila for the murder of an influential police colonel, Rolando Abadilla. The five men were arrested, charged and convicted three years later for the murder of Abadilla in June 1996. After they were convicted, the automatic appellate review of their sentence has dragged on for nearly eight years.
It was first submitted for automatic review to the Supreme Court (SC), as required by law for cases involving the death penalty. However, the case has been pending five years at the SC without decision. Without even completing its review, the SC transferred it to the Court of Appeals (CA) pursuant to a new ruling on appellate review. Once again, after three years the CA has not completed its appellate review and in doing so it has failed to comply with the Constitutional provision that it should have been completed within one year.
Since the case was submitted for review with the CA, nine justices have been appointed, but none of them have been able to complete the review and make a decision. Over the years a pattern has emerged whereby once the case is assigned to them, justices reviewing it often delay it for months; they inhibit the review of the case, or unload it to other justices. The prisoners have been in jail for a decade, and the law on the Death Penalty in the country has already been abolished; yet the appellate review on the case has not been completed.
This case of Abadilla five namely, Lenido Lumanog, Augusto Santos, Senior Police Officer 2 (SPO2) Cesar Fortuna, Rameses de Jesus and Joel de Jesus, explains how tremendous and systemically defective the country’s judicial proceedings are. This failure by justices to ensure the case is promptly reviewed and decided upon is in complete disregard to the notion of speedy trial and equality before law. The judiciary has made themselves complicit in the delay of this case and even a rudimentary review of the case by the appellate court has continuously failed to happen.
Failing to review and promptly give its decision speaks to the complete disregard of the justices for the welfare of these five prisoners who have been imprisoned since 1996. The CA’s complicity is depriving these persons of their Constitutional rights to have adequate remedies and their case promptly reviewed. It is tantamount to abandoning the core principles and fundamentals of the judiciary that they claimed to uphold. It subverts the notion of equality before law. For continuously failing to ensure this case is promptly reviewed and decided upon, the judiciary has become responsible of depriving these men of their liberty and to continuously suffer in jail without any adequate means of legal redress.
It also explains how miserable the life of prisoners could become in jail when the institution responsible of delivering justice had become incapable of doing so. By law, the sentences imposed by the Regional Trial Court (RTC) upon the five persons could only become final and unchallenged once an appellate review is completed and a decision is made. Though these men have already been convicted by a lower court, whether or not the punishment it imposed or their innocence or guilt had been established beyond reasonable doubt, could only be decided with finality in an appellate review. But this is where the judiciary has failed; and the suffering experienced by these prisoners is happening because of this failure.
Not only they were deprived of prompt review of their case, their continued detention has likewise threatened the life of one of them, Lenido Lumanog. Lenido has been a kidney transplant patient for nearly five years. His continued detention has worsened his medical condition which is a result of the poor environment and medical facilities inside the jail. His family, too, struggled to support the huge cost of his regular medication for lack of government support. Despite his worsening medical condition, he has been deprived from obtaining any remedies; for instance conditional release for humanitarian consideration or for medical treatment.
The judiciary’s continued failure on this case is completely unacceptable. Apart from their unnecessarily suffering in jail because of the delay of their case, the likelihood of their case being effectively and adequately reviewed is trivial. As mentioned earlier, nine justices have already been appointed but have so far failed to complete the review of their case. By passing the case from one justice to another, this in itself seriously undermines the probability of this case being decided fairly and intelligibly. In any case, one of the points to ensure the case is being effectively reviewed is primary to ensure the justice or judges reviewing it spent most of it time consistently studying its merit. This has obviously not happened in this case. Often, once a new justice is assigned they have to begin from square one.
The case of the Abadilla Five illustrates how any person can suffer once the country’s system of justice fails to perform even its fundamental obligation; and that the possibility of holding them to account is trivial. For now, there is nothing much the victims could do other than to wait for the current justice to complete his review of the case, and when that will happen, nobody knows. The prisoners are effectively at the mercy of the justice whose inaction and incompetence cannot be challenged because there is no longer a mechanism for this to be done. When the institution becomes complicit to court delays, to claim that speedy trial and equality before law still exists is absurd. The institution of justice has instead effectively deprived these prisoners of being treated fairly and equally before law.
The AHRC urges the CA to ensure that the case of Abadilla Five is reviewed and decided upon without delay. We also urge the international community, in particular the legal professionals, jurists and the people concerned with the welfare of these prisoners to intervene by drawing the attention of the government to this case. The complicity of the government, in particular the judiciary, by tolerating the unnecessary delays in this case is unacceptable.
