BY RAYMOND AFRICA and WENDELL VIGILIA
SEN. Leila de Lima yesterday slammed the Department of Justice’s decision to adopt the position of its panel of prosecutors to go on with the prosecution of her drug cases amid claims that some of the witnesses were coerced to pin her down.
This was after Justice Secretary Menardo Guevarra said “there is good reason to continue the active prosecution of the senator” based on the thorough review of the panel of evidence presented against her.
At the House, opposition leader Rep. Edcel Lagman (LP, Albay), urged President-elect Ferdinand Marcos Jr. to “liberate” De Lima from an “odious incarceration,” saying her case would be the “litmus test of his sense of justice and adherence to the rule of law.”
“Since the President ultimately controls the prosecution of criminal cases, the public prosecutors must be directed to desist from further prosecuting De Lima for want of competent and credible evidence,” Lagman said.
De Lima has been in prison for more than five years, since February 2017, on perceived trumped-up drug charges. One of the three drug cases filed against her was dismissed in February 2021 for insufficiency of evidence, and major prosecution witnesses in the two other pending cases have voluntarily recanted for allegedly having been coerced to testify and the other witnesses have failed to pin down the senator.
De Lima, justice secretary under the previous government, said the DOJ under Guevarra should have dug deeper because of the recantation of several witnesses — Rafael Ragos, former officer in charge of the Bureau of Corrections (BuCor); self-confessed drug lord Kerwin Espinosa; and Ronnie Dayan, De Lima’s former aide and co-accused.
On Ragos, in particular, De Lima asked if Guevarra even confronted the panel of prosecutors as to the truth about Ragos’ accusations against them.
“It is doubtful that Secretary Guevarra even read the recantation of Rafael Ragos where it was revealed that early on, Ragos already told the members of this panel not to expect his testimony to be perfect, given that it was all made up lies and forced upon him by former SOJ (secretary of justice) Vitaliano Aguirre,” De Lima said.
“Frustrating but not at all surprising or unexpected. I guess it was wishful thinking to expect anything different from Secretary Guevarra. Regrettably, it is still a Pontius Pilate act when he simply relied on the so-called ‘assessment’ of the very panel of prosecutors handling the cases,” she added.
De Lima said Guevarra “is minded to stand by the lies and manufactured evidence of the Duterte government” since he does not want to displease his principal up to the end of his term.
“He is, after all, Duterte’s alter ego. Never mind justice. Never mind fair play. Never mind that an innocent person was kept in jail for the past five years, and counting, without real evidence except the lies of mostly convicted felons. Never mind the Truth,” she said.
“It pains me that the very institution that I served faithfully has failed in its foremost, noble task to protect the innocent,” she added.
