FOUR centuries ago, three people were publicly executed in England following their confession to murder.
The executions raised a public howl after the confession turned out to be false. Everyone was shocked when the murdered “victim” turned up alive, putting into question the capacity of the English criminal process to objectively render justice outside of confessions.
Legal scholars started seeing how confessions had become potentially unreliable evidence of objective truth, as they may be procured via coercion, intimidation, even bribery.
This is how the doctrine of “corpus delicti” supposedly began. Literally, it means “body of the crime.” This rule prohibits the prosecutor from proving an offense anchored solely on confessions.
For instance, the corpse of the victim is a component part of a body of essential facts that, taken together, prove that the crime of murder has been committed.
Corpus delicti can also refer to the actual physical object upon which a crime has been committed.
In a case of arson, it would be a corroded house or building. In a case of theft, the personal effect, e.g., an expensive wristwatch, is the corpus delicti, and must be shown to have been owned or possessed by the complainant.
The drug case of Sen. Leila de Lima presents an opportunity for us to gain insight into this doctrine. She has been in prison in the past five years, and is now reported to be incommunicado in the context of the health quarantine.
A conviction for illegal sale of dangerous drugs can only be sustained if there is proof that the transaction or sale took place. The illegal drug itself constitutes the corpus delicti of the offense.
Police operatives have been wailing against what they think as pesky technicalities, but proof beyond reasonable doubt demands nothing less than the corpus delicti in drug cases.
According to the Supreme Court, the chain of custody must be shown to be impregnable because it ensures that doubts concerning the identity of the evidence are removed. Mere testimony by the police would not be sufficient.
Senator de Lima is in detention because of the accusation that when she was Secretary of Justice, she received millions of pesos from Rafael Marcos Ragos, who used to be director of the Bureau of Corrections. The conduit was Ronnie Dayan, who received the amounts in behalf of de Lima.
It is claimed that Ragos used his position to extort money from the high-profile drug lords in the New Bilibid Prison to finance de Lima’s candidacy in the May 2016 senatorial elections.
But as pointed out by Justice Antonio Carpio, the drug charges against de Lima had no specified seller, no specified buyer, no specified kind of dangerous drug, no specified quantity of dangerous drugs, no specified consideration, no specified delivery, and no specified payment.
Prosecutors present evidence in support of the allegations contained in the charge sheet, or what lawyers call the criminal “Information.” The essential elements of the crime must be stated in the Information.
Any person accused of committing a crime is entitled to know the nature and cause of the accusation against him. That right is violated when prosecutors in a drug case do not state the identities of the seller and buyer, when they do not identify and quantify the drugs involved in the so-called sale, and when they cannot even quote the amount of money that changed hands in the sale.
To emphasize, the corpus delicti is the actual sale of the dangerous drugs. There is no “body of the crime” if the Information does not state the particulars of the transaction.
The corpus delicti rule has been defended by courts worldwide because it protects innocent persons from their own objectively false confession. It also shields the justice system against coerced confessions.
More importantly, the rule promotes better law enforcement by discouraging techniques that rely heavily on testimonial evidence. In a way, it serves to protect a citizen against mob rule buoyed by official misconduct.
It is at once evident that the de Lima indictment had banked rather heavily on the sound bites of Ragos, Dayan, and the drug lords themselves when it was fashionable to so pillory the former chairperson of the Commission on Human Rights.
In the meantime, she languishes in detention pending trial, an inordinately slow process that in itself has been a pockmark to our brand of justice./PN
