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By Johnna Villaviray and Ric Puod,
Senior Reporters
The 20th death anniversary this Thursday of the
martyrdom of former Sen. Benigno Aquino Jr. will be commemorated by
his wife, children and Filipinos who regard him as a hero, but it
could mark a frustrating legal dead end: the expiration of the
prescription when the elusive mastermind behind the murder could
still be charged in court.
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A
handwritten letter from former master
sergeant Pablo Martinez to The Manila
Times details his knowledge of the
assassination plot that changed
the nation’s history. |
As the clock ticks away, there are no signs that
the mastermind is anywhere near being exposed, or shackled.
And as that turbulent period becomes a haze in
memory, the Aquinos have resigned themselves to frustration,
comforted only by the thought that the senator’s death had ignited
the revolution that deposed his arch-rival, Ferdinand Marcos, and
restored democracy to the country.
“The directly guilty, as far as we are
concerned, have already been judged by history, by the people,”
the former senator’s only son, Benigno III, told The Manila Times.
But the younger Aquino, fondly called “Noynoy,”
acknowledged that people outside the family have been reminding him
that the family needs to act now if the plotters of his father’s
murder are to be brought to trial.
Under the law, the government has 20 years to
run after people who commit murder. When that prescription lapses,
the law considers criminal liability extinguished.
Sandiganbayan Associate Justice Edilberto
Sandoval, in his book Pointers in Criminal Law, explained that the
law provides “a sort of condonation or amnesty” for people who
evade the law.
“The convict who evades sentence is
sometimes sufficiently punished by his voluntary and self-imposed
punishment, and at times his voluntary exile is more grievous than
the sentence he was trying to avoid,” Sandoval said.
“And all the time he has to use his ingenuity
and means to outwit the government agencies bent on recapturing
him.”
This possibility was at the back of Noynoy’s
mind.
He acknowledged that he didn’t want the brains
to get away with murder.
Pursuing leads provided by the alternative story
of his father’s murder, Noynoy tried earlier this year to locate
the people who might have knowledge of it.
“[I have] a lead, but probably a hostile
witness. Part of the group,” he admitted, but declined to identify
his potential witness. Noynoy did not confirm if he was alluding to
Col. Romeo Ochoco, the deputy commander of the Aviation Security
Command (Avsecom) when Aquino was killed.
He described his suspect only as a junior
officer among those “initially investigated but rapidly
exonerated.”
He was not the only one thinking of a
reinvestigation.
Deputy House Speaker Raul M. Gonzalez, a
prosecutor in the Aquino-Galman case, even went to the extent of
confirming Ochoco’s whereabouts abroad. He failed to get firm
leads, however.
There are strong indications that Ochoco went
AWOL shortly after Marcos fell in 1986. Ochoco was purportedly
directed to escort Edna Camcam, a friend of Marcos’s military
chief of staff, Fabian Ver, and her children to Hong Kong.
A distant cousin and fellow officer, Brillante
Ochoco, now the administrator of the Veterans Memorial Medical
Center golf course, confirmed that Colonel Ochoco had not been heard
of since that time.
Noynoy’s and Gonzalez’s efforts to trace
Ochoco and Capt. Felipe Valerio of Avsecom were stymied.
Noynoy said that his mother, former President
Corazon Aquino, was concerned that the search for Ochoco and other
officers who might have knowledge of the killing would be a wild
goose chase that could take his time away from his responsibilities
to his constituents in Tarlac.
“I asked my mother’s permission [but she
said] that wasn’t her priority at this time,” he said.
Gonzalez’s efforts were snagged by legal
worries–he needed prima facie evidence before the court would
entertain a request to reopen a case against specific persons
implicated in the 1983 murder. That evidence should convince the
fiscal and the judge “with moral certainty” that these people
were involved in the crime.
“Because if you have nothing but [unconfirmed
rumors], yung mga balita na naririnig that’s pure hearsay,”
Gonzalez explained.
Hearsay is how many regard the account of Master
Sgt. Pablo Martinez and his fellow convicts of the events that took
place on the tarmac of the then Manila International Airport in 1983
on Thursday.
Martinez and the 15 others convicted of killing
Aquino and Rolando Galman, supposedly a communist assassin blamed by
the Marcos government for Aquino’s murder, had been circulating
the story for several years now in a campaign to reopen the case.
They’ve approached President Aquino, Manila Archbishop Jaime
Cardinal Sin and lawmakers, but no one took them seriously.
Capt. Romeo Bautista, the senior officer
languishing at the national penitentiary for the twin murders,
observed that their conviction satisfied public clamor for
retribution while sparing the prominent personalities earlier
implicated.
“It’s no big surprise, because everybody’s
happy,” Bautista told The Times, disappointed at the present scant
public attention on the case.
Like the Aquinos, Bautista said his group is
also racing against time to reopen the case before the 20-year
prescription lapses on August 21.
But Vicky de los Reyes, a lawyer of the
Integrated Bar of the Philippines, said even unidentified
suspects–identified in the charge sheet as John Does–are covered
by the statute of limitations.
She explained that the prescription begins from
the date the crime was committed, not the discovery of the crime or
the discovery of a person’s involvement in it.
But the Revised Penal Code provides exemptions
that muddle the prescription limits.
Sandoval, in his book, said, “The period shall
be interrupted by the filing of the complaint or information, and
shall commence to run again when such proceedings terminate without
the accused being convicted or acquitted, or are unjustifiably
stopped for any reason not imputable to him.”
Gonzalez is confident that the John Does are
covered by this exemption.
“If we can establish a prima facie case
against Ochoco, we can open this case against him, not against
everybody,” he said.
Rodolfo Jimenez, who defended then-Gen. Luther
Custodio, the senior officer to be convicted of the Aquino-Galman
murders but who didn’t serve time owing to his illness, agreed
that the case could still be reopened.
Reviving the case would, in the end, rest on the
Supreme Court. The Court has been under fire before for agreeing to
retry the Aquino-Galman case even after the Sandiganbayan in 1985
acquitted all those accused.
The Court effectively overturned the principle
against double jeopardy, which protects individuals for being tried
a second time for the same offense. It justified its decision by
saying that the first trial had been a sham owing to the influence
wielded by Marcos’ Malacañang over the Sandiganbayan justices,
who were instructed by the dictator how to conduct the hearing.
Noynoy acknowledged that reviving the
investigation was not included in his family’s preparations to
commemorate his father’s death anniversary this year.
But he cautioned against interpreting it as
indifference, explaining that his family is more fortunate than
relatives of the hundreds of political dissidents who disappeared
under martial law and whose fates remain unknown until today.
“I think I’m better off. My father’s
remains are in the Manila Memorial park. I managed to bury him. I
know precisely what his fate was.”
(To be continued)
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