‘While many attempts have been made to speed up the wheels of justice, they continue to grind slowly, lending truth to the lament of many that justice delayed is no justice at all.’
JUSTICE delayed is justice denied.
It’s a saying as old as time; trite but it rings true still, especially in the Philippines, where the road to justice is a “million miles” long.
Consider:
In last year’s Senate deliberations on the judiciary budget, it was revealed that nearly one million cases, 933,624 to be exact, remained pending in all courts at various levels of the judiciary.
It wasn’t clear if the number represented case load or backlog. It was not clear either what year the cases covered.
But to be sure, the number had not changed much over the last 20 years or so.
In 2006, the total case load in lower courts reached 1,129,733. The backlog — meaning pending or undecided cases at year-end – was 692,526.
If the number reported in the Senate represented backlogs, then the situation has gotten worse by almost 50 percent since 2006.
It appears we have become a nation of backlogs.
Our classroom backlog, for example, though not as bad as the backlog in court cases, has also grown by leaps and bounds since I learned my ABC.
We have a 150,000-classroom backlog and at the rate the Department of Education is building classrooms — 1,500 a year — it will take the DepEd one venture to solve the backlog, and that’s assuming no additional classrooms will be needed.
But additional classrooms are needed every year, just as new cases are filed in courts each year.
And because the court clearance rate is not 100 percent, meaning not all new cases are decided during the year, the backlog will continue to grow each year.
Which means we will forever have case backlogs.
And some of these backlog cases are as old as six to 10 years.
Data also show that nearly 80 percent of the backlog is criminal cases, a big chunk of them involving the poor.
The situation is true not only for the lower courts but the Supreme Court as well. The SC backlog cited in the Senate stood at 14,756. Even if the High Court disposed of five cases a day, it will take nearly 3,000 days (or 10 years) to wipe out the backlog.
But then again, new cases are filed each year. So we are caught in an endless cycle.
While many attempts have been made to speed up the wheels of justice, they continue to grind slowly, lending truth to the lament of many that justice delayed is no justice at all.
We are not only a nation of backlogs. We are a nation of injustice.
