Offering a bounty to kill the President or any person is a bad joke and certainly should not be done mindlessly.
Before condemning the message, we need to know first who the offeror is. An offer of P100 million coming from a habal-habal driver, P50 million from a public-school teacher, or P75 million from a plain housewife would certainly not be taken seriously. The taker will have lingering doubts in his or her mind as to the certainty of the reward especially that the mission is next to impossible for one person to carryout considering that the target is surrounded by highly-trained guards. But the NBI and the Police hunted down these ordinary and hapless mortals for committing the crime of inciting to sedition modernized by social media and made more notorious as a cybercrime.
Aren’t these exactly the words that come out from the mouth of the President every now and then? They are. But note the difference: the persons arrested have no P100 million or P75 million or P50 million. The President has a lot of financial and human resources at his disposal. The greatest disparity of all is that the President’s mouth is covered by the protective mantle of immunity from suit while those ordinary mortals have nothing but their ululating cries of regret.
Should the sauce for the goose be the sauce for the gander? Advocates of the black-letter law would quickly argue on the distinction that brings out the greatest divide: the President has the immunity (at least during his incumbency); the mortals have none. Like a horse pulling the famous Tartanilla in the streets, positivists need only to examine the presence of the elements of the crime and dismiss any explanation as a matter of defense to quickly conclude that a crime has been committed. And there go the miseries of the prosecuted, or even worse, the agony of those deprived of liberty for lack of money to post bail, enduring the pains of a long and excruciating public trial. As the naturalist have long argued since time immemorial, positive law such as our criminal laws should not only pretend that justice is served by limiting its application in the letter that sometimes kills the spirit of the law; it must actually fulfill its moral functions, at least to a certain degree.
The arrests of the habal-habal driver, the public-school teacher, or the ordinary housewife raise a serious issue of privilege. One has it, the others simply have none. And we have not even mentioned the general with the red roses. This brings us back to the clarion call that the law must be the great equalizer. By now, this is more of a theory than a reality.
– By Atty. Greg Borja Austral, CPA