A man dies in the dark and the first thing we do is put his ghost on trial.
We sift through the wreckage of a life ended by violence and we look for reasons to look away. We hear whispers of illegal trades and illicit associations and we feel a quiet sense of relief. We tell ourselves that he was no saint. We tell ourselves that he invited the shadows. In doing so we perform a secondary execution. We kill the victim’s right to be a human being before the law and we replace him with a label.
How exactly do we value a life? Do we weigh its worth on the scales of a person’s moral values? Do we calculate it based on their character or their contribution to society? If we decide that life is a prize to be earned through good behavior then we have abandoned the very concept of human rights. If the value of a soul is subject to a performance review by the public or the police then no one is truly alive. We are all merely on probation.
The 1987 Constitution of the Republic of the Philippines does not grant rights as a reward for being a good citizen. It recognizes them as inherent and unalienable. Under Article III Section 1 the mandate is absolute that no person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law.
It does not say no innocent person. It does not say no person of high standing. It says no person. This is the cornerstone of our civilization and yet we have seen it treated as a mere suggestion.
When a member of law enforcement is accused of a brutal assault while intoxicated and off duty the conversation should begin and end with this constitutional breach. Instead the narrative has been steered toward the victim’s reputation. This is a calculated distraction. It is a siren song meant to lure us into the belief that safety is a commodity traded for the rights of the “unworthy.”
We must ask ourselves what we actually believe about the law. If the Bill of Rights is a shield, it must be held over the head of the sinner just as firmly as it is held over the head of the saint. The moment we allow an officer to become a judge and a jury in a private residence, then we have traded our democracy for a fiefdom. We have decided that the uniform is a license to settle scores and that the Constitution is a document for the privileged few.
For seven months a family lived in the silence of absolute terror. They watched as a primary suspect was moved from one town to another as if geography could erase the death of loved one. They watched as the institution designed to protect them acted as a travel agency for the accused. This is not just a failure of one man. It is a failure of a system that prioritizes the reputation of the organization over the sanctity of human life.
If we accept the “pusher” narrative as a justification for a beating, we are essentially voting for our own eventual disappearance.
History is littered with societies that began by executing the “undesirables” and ended by turning on the innocent. When the gate of due process is kicked open for one man, it stays open for everyone.
In 1793, Maximilien Robespierre and the Committee of Public Safety bypassed traditional judicial protections in the name of “purifying” the Republic. They believed that the “enemies of the state,” much like the “undesirables” of today’s rhetoric, did not deserve the slow, meticulous protections of a courtroom. Judgment moved from the halls of justice to the hands of men in the streets. Because the law was seen as a barrier to “cleaning up” society, they stripped away due process.
The result was not a safer France, but a bloodbath where the definition of “criminal” expanded until no one was safe. It proved that once you give the state or its officers the power to decide who is “unworthy” of a trial, the guillotine eventually finds its way to the innocent.
The badge is meant to be a symbol of the law’s restraint. It is the visible proof that we have moved past the era of the blood feud and into the era of the courtroom. But when that badge is used to hide a crime it becomes something else entirely. It becomes a weapon used to bludgeon the very concept of justice.
We should be worried. We should be deeply unsettled by the ease with which we are asked to ignore a traumatic death because of a victim’s history. We should be terrified that a seven month silence was broken only by the persistence of truth and the weight of evidence.
The question is no longer who the victim was.
The question is who we are. Are we a community that believes in the absolute right to a trial or are we a mob that finds comfort in a convenient death? If we do not demand an answer, we have already surrendered our future to the darkness.
In the end, the measure of a civilization is not how it treats its best citizens, but how it treats its ‘worst.’ If we allow the streets to become the courtroom and a police officer’s fists to become the verdict, we have traded the Rule of Law for the Rule of Force.
