THE ACQUITTAL OF HUBERT WEBB

Not satisfied with pissing off the Noynoy administration

and inviting vituperation from the same, the Supreme
Court dives in to invite public if ignorant condemnation by
declaring the convicted rapist and murderers of the
Vizconde Family innocent in a decision that reads like a
police procedural and bores like a dental drill into the old
story—and finds fatal cavities therein.

IN the past two weeks the Corona Court—not the “Arroyo Court”, as
UP professors, publicity-hungry lawyers, ignorant newsmen and more
ignorant newspaper columnists, the public at large, and a violent anti-
violence crusader, contemptuously referred to it—for which they
should be cited for contempt and jailed until they retract and
apologize—issued two brave rulings, which are correct in the result
though not always in the reasoning and nigh unpopular. Both in the
teeth of a stupid public (an unavoidable condition) and a willfully
ignorant media (a condition that is usually paid for).

The first decision, striking down President Noynoy’s first

official act, Executive Order No. 1 creating a Truth Commission to
find facts that would single out as guilty the Gloria Macapagal Arroyo
(GMA) administration’s top officials and her close allies with regard
to three events for the purposes of prosecuting them criminally. They
were, to wit, the Garci Tapes Scandal where the only real crime
committed established was the illegal wiretap of GMA and the illegal
distribution and playing of those illegal wiretaps; the NBN-ZTE deal,
stolen from one Joey de Venecia, to set up a staggeringly expensive
but totally useless exclusively government communications backbone;
and the Fertilizer Scam that distributed sums anywhere from P3 to P5
million in cash to each congressman for watered down if not spurious
fertilizer about which all congressmen in the administration and the
opposition kept mum until a single congressman complained about (1)
why he was included among the beneficiaries when he hadn’t received
a peso of the money for (2) watered down fertilizer intended for his
entirely concretized, highly urbanized district of Makati.

The Corona Court found that the President’s EO authorizing

himself to create a truth commission for the above purpose (which
smacked of a bill of attainder tar-brushing persons without the benefit
of a judicial trial and positing as fact what were yet rumors of criminal
misconduct) could not be authorized by the president’s power to
reorganize his department under administrative law and was therefore
illegal. The Court had had enough of the confusing mish-mash of
overlapping functions and authorities throughout, across, as well as
inside and outside the three branches of government thereby erasing
the distinctions of a system of separate powers and unsetting the
equilibrium of a democratic system of checks and balance. While this
executed the Truth Commission by firing squad, the coup de grace
delivered by the Corona Court was the major ruling that President
Noynoy’s Truth Commission issued in conjunction with a short,
sharp, vitriolic and vindictive first inaugural address singling out the
Arroyo administration as the target of its investigations, amounted to a
violation of the equal protection clause of the Bill of Rights in the
Constitution which is the principal pillar and support of a democratic
society.

There were immediate howls of protest from everyone who was

hungry for publicity in a fallow post-election period and yet had
missed every opportunity available at the time these alleged anomalies
had transpired to find legal proof establishing prima facie criminal
cases against them. Instead they either grabbed or made up out of
whole cloth every baseless rumor about these events and published
them as fact, only to be debunked by yet other baseless rumors
published as fact, all the while avoiding any effort to legally establish
legal proof of them.

Fast on the heels of this howling controversy, the Corona Court

promulgated, in the teeth of ignorant and hostile public opinion, not to
mention vituperative (and contemptuous) reaction, an irreversible
decision supported by a clear majority of the justices participating
acquitting Hubert Webb and his companions of the crimes of rape and
murders for which they had been sentenced to life imprisonment and
had already served 15 years in jail and for which the Congress had
readopted the death penalty proscribed by the 1987 Constitution.
 Perhaps sensing that the mood had changed when Congress all
but unanimously voted to repeal the death sentence a few years ago,
the Corona Court revisited the Webb case and, in the teeth of high
judicial practice, reviewed the evidence and decision of the trial court
and the Court of Appeals and found (1) that it originated mainly from
a single source, to wit, a drug-addicted, drug-using and drug-dealing
NBI asset prone to lying called Jessica Alfaro; (2) that there really
were no actual eyewitnesses to the gruesome rape and murders
because Jessica Alfaro said she had proudly stepped forward with (a)
the possibility of an eyewitness who had narrated to her everything
that had transpired during the rape and murders and (b) had
nonetheless refused to come forward and (c) as a result, she would
repeat his testimony as though she herself had been the eyewitness—
to all of which the National Bureau of Investigation acceded.

The Court acknowledged that Alfaro did give an impressively

detailed testimony of every gruesome detail of the rape and murders
of the Vizconde family that she could just as well have read about in
the gruesomely detailed newspaper accounts of the crimes as well as
in the details supplied to her by the NBI investigators who were her
handlers (she had long been a police asset for squealing on NBI
targets)—as she might have witnessed them herself but only if she
could be in several places around the crime scene at the same time.
This betokened a teleportation and parallel existence for which the
Court had received no evidence both about her and from quantum
mechanics for which no one made a proffer. Alfaro’s account had her
inside and outside the Vizconde house, indifferent and oblivious to
 what was happening inside, elated and distressed at what was
supposedly happening inside, all the time making no effort along with
her murderous or complicit companions to hide themselves from
possible public view while the crimes were taking place.

The Court brilliantly summed up the case as follows:

“On June 30, 1991 Estrellita Vizconde and her daughters Carmela,
nineteen years old, and Jennifer, seven, were brutally slain at their home in
Parañaque City. Following an intense investigation, the police arrested a
group of suspects, some of whom gave detailed confessions. But the trial
court smelled a frame-up and eventually ordered them discharged. Thus, the
identities of the real perpetrators remained a mystery especially to the public
whose interests were aroused by the gripping details of what everybody
referred to as the Vizconde massacre.

“Four years later in 1995, the National Bureau of Investigation or

NBI announced that it had solved the crime. It presented star-witness

Jessica M. Alfaro, one of its informers, who claimed that she witnessed the
crime. She pointed to accused Hubert Jeffrey P. Webb, Antonio “Tony
Boy” Lejano, Artemio “Dong” Ventura, Michael A. Gatchalian, Hospicio
“Pyke” Fernandez, Peter Estrada, Miguel “Ging” Rodriguez, and Joey Filart
as the culprits. She also tagged accused police officer, Gerardo Biong, as an
accessory after the fact. Relying primarily on Alfaro's testimony, on August
10, 1995 the public prosecutors filed an information for rape with homicide
against Webb, et al.
 “The Regional Trial Court of Parañaque City, Branch 274, presided
over by Judge Amelita G. Tolentino, tried only seven of the accused since
Artemio Ventura and Joey Filart remained at large. The prosecution
presented Alfaro as its main witness with the others corroborating her
testimony. These included the medico-legal officer who autopsied the
bodies of the victims, the security guards of Pitong Daan Subdivision, the
former laundrywoman of the Webb household, police officer Biong’s former
girlfriend, and Lauro G. Vizconde, Estrellita’s husband.”

Against these accusations, the principal accused Hubert Webb

presented incontrovertible proof that he was thousands of miles away, in the
United States, before, as and after the crimes were committed. US Secretary
of State Madeleine Albright’s office issued a certification to that effect.

The media denounced the certification as having been purchased by

the father, Sen. Freddie Webb, of the accused Hubert, despite the fact that
the US government vigorously prosecutes and never compromises with
individuals who can easily dispose of hundreds of billions of dollars. To wit,
Latin American drug lords, errant investment bankers, savings and loans
presidents, Arab sheiks and, most particularly, anyone rich or poor, who fails
to report his income and pay the right taxes there on—all on the slimmest
evidence and the slightest pretext. Yet the media charged that Sen. Freddie
Webb, to be sure a retired basketball player famous in his prime but at a time
when businesses were sponsoring basketball teams for comparative peanuts
and in devalued pesos was buying the exalted office of the second highest
US official after the US President to certify that his son was in the United
States when all the time he was in the Philippines raping one girl after
murdering her mother and little sister.
 The trial court bought it and said that the errant actions (e.g.,
loosening a light bulb to darken a place that wouldn’t anyway be the crime
scene, breaking into a house whose door had been purposely left open not to
mention frantically seeking while already inside the house the keys to the
house door), the variable testimony, the wildly swinging psychological
reactions of the eyewitness who was not an eyewitness, by her own
admission, but was only repeating what an eyewitness she never produced
had told her trumped—meaning to say, beat—the officially certified
documentary evidence of official American immigration procedures that the
principal accused, Hubert Webb, had been subjected to going in and, months
after the crime, getting out of the United States. Against such official acts,
proof that Jessica Alfaro was a compulsive liar, a police asset willing to do
and say anything to help her police handlers look good especially after four
months of turning up nothing in the Vizconde massacre investigation, as
when she beat up a police lineup suspect that she claimed she knew
intimately and had threatened her. To her own, the police suspect’s, as well
as the NBI’s surprise, he turned out to be another person. He was dusted off,
patched up and sent home.

But impressed by Alfaro’s detailed narration of the crime and the

events surrounding it, the trial court found a credible witness in her. It noted
her categorical, straightforward, spontaneous, and frank testimony,
undamaged by grueling cross-examinations. The trial court remained
unfazed by significant discrepancies between Alfaro’s April 28 and May 22,
1995 affidavits, accepting her explanation that she at first wanted to protect
her former boyfriend, accused Estrada, and a relative, accused Gatchalian;
that no lawyer assisted her; that she did not trust the investigators who
helped her prepare her first affidavit; and that she felt unsure if she would
get the support and security she needed once she disclosed all about the
Vizconde killings.

“In contrast,” the Court said, “the trial court thought little of the

denials and alibis that Webb, Lejano, Rodriguez, and Gatchalian set up for
their defense… Thus, on January 4, 2000, after four years of arduous
hearings, the trial court rendered judgment, finding all the accused guilty as
charged and imposing on Webb” et al life sentences.

“On appeal, the Court of Appeals affirmed the trial court’s

decision…. The appellate court did not agree that the accused were tried by
publicity or that the trial judge was biased….”

The convicted tried to reverse their convictions over the years until
they raised for the umpteenth time an issue that the police, the prosecution,
the trial court, the appellate court and even early Supreme Courts ignored:
why couldn’t a DNA test be conducted to determine if the semen sample
found in Carmela Vizconde matched Webb’s semen?

The semen sample was lost when the prosecution brought it to court,
left it with the judge and, maybe, he licked it but it couldn’t be found. At any
rate, the ignorant argued that if the semen sample had been tainted so would
the DNA examination results that might have come out of it.

DNA is never tainted. It is degraded. Perhaps over time. So degraded

it cannot be determined whose DNA it is. But if it is at all extant—or shall
we shall “alive”—it will be possible to analyze it and in analyzing it found
whose DNA it is. There could be several DNAs in the sample, some from
the hands of police investigators, the saliva of forensic examiners who talk
or even eat while they work and so spew saliva—Filipinos can never stop
eating—but however many DNAs there are in a sample, if the sample is at
all viable it can be analyzed and the various strands distinguished, separated,
and identified as belonging to, say, the cops, the forensic examiners, the NBI
director, hell even anybody who got off on it—along with the one who raped
and murdered Carmela Vizconde.

“The medical evidence clearly established that Carmela was raped

and, consistent with this,” said the Court, “semen specimen was found in
her. It is true that Alfaro identified Webb in her testimony as Carmela’s
rapist and killer but serious questions had been raised about her credibility.
At the very least, there exists a possibility that Alfaro had lied. On the other
hand, the semen specimen taken from Carmela cannot possibly lie. It cannot
be coached or allured by a promise of reward or financial support. No two
persons have the same DNA fingerprint, with the exception of identical
twins. If, on examination, the DNA of the subject specimen does not belong
to Webb, then he did not rape Carmela. It is that simple. Thus, the Court
would have been able to determine that Alfaro committed perjury in saying
that he did.”
 But the Court, on the seminal issue, ruled that there wasn’t a clear
duty for the police to preserve DNA samples when the case was on trial, not
least because the technology to conduct DNA tests did not exist yet in the
country.

One wonders why the Webbs didn’t ask the FBI for help. But then try
having your son charged with multiple murder and rape and see if you can
think of such alternatives. At any rate, the Supreme Court didn’t think it was
important. The sample was lost. There is a duty of the police to keep
evidence indefinitely. That duty was neglected, perhaps willfully. Who
knows?

What was more important for the Court was something that didn’t
require DNA analysis—but was susceptible to reason: the self-contradictory
and occasionally improbable testimony of Jessica Alfaro—a police asset for
God’s sake, whose utility to and income from the police depended on how
useful she made herself to them—who admitted that she never saw anything
herself but claimed to know someone who did witness every detail of the
horrible multiple crimes and had told it all to her. And as she could not
produce this someone, she would just pretend to be that someone and pass of
his testimony—though hearsay from her mouth—as her own.

And upon that basis, and in the teeth of Madeleine Albright’s official
certification that Hubert Webb was in America when the crime was
committed, the trial court convicted all the accused they could catch—minus
two still on run—one wonders what will happen to them now?—and
sentenced them to life in prison of which they served already 15 years.
 The Supreme Court chose, at this late date—and some procedural
experts would argue, way out of time and judicial propriety—to retry the
case as though it were a trial court and not the final court of appeal open
only to questions of law. The Court found Alfaro’s testimony improbable
and Webb’s alibi unassailable and on that factual basis—which is the best
basis of all because it is not a mere technicality—acquitted him and his co-
accused and set them free immediately to rejoin their families in their
collective old age. For these young men had gone in in their 20s and left it in
their 40s.

The real words of the Supreme Court

“ULTIMATELY,” said the Court, “the controlling issues are:

“1. Whether or not Alfaro’s testimony as eyewitness, describing

the crime and identifying Webb, Lejano, Gatchalian, Fernandez, Estrada,
Rodriguez, and two others as the persons who committed it, is entitled to
belief; and

“2. Whether or not Webb presented sufficient evidence to prove his

alibi and rebut Alfaro’s testimony that he led the others in committing the
crime.

Merits of the case

 Said the Court: “Alfaro was, at the time she revealed her story,
working for the NBI as an “asset,” a stool pigeon, one who earned her living
by fraternizing with criminals so she could squeal on them to her NBI
handlers. She had to live a life of lies to get rewards that would pay for her
subsistence and vices.

“xxx

“When Alfaro seemed unproductive for sometime, however, they

teased her about it and she was piqued. One day, she unexpectedly told
Sacaguing that she knew someone who had the real story behind the
Vizconde massacre. Sacaguing showed interest. Alfaro promised to bring
that someone to the NBI to tell his story. When this did not happen and
Sacaguing continued to press her, she told him that she might as well assume
the role of her informant. Sacaguing testified thus:

ATTY. ONGKIKO:
Q. Atty. Sacaguing, how did Jessica Alfaro become a witness in
the Vizconde murder case? Will you tell the Honorable Court?

xxxx

A. She told me. Your Honor, that she knew somebody who
related to her the circumstances, I mean, the details of the
massacre of the Vizconde family. That’s what she told me,
Your Honor.

ATTY. ONGKIKO:
Q. And what did you say?

xxxx

A. I was quite interested and I tried to persuade her to introduce

to me that man and she promised that in due time, she will
bring to me the man, and together with her, we will try to
 convince him to act as a state witness and help us in the
solution of the case.

xxxx

Q. Atty. Sacaguing, were you able to interview this alleged

witness?

WITNESS SACAGUING:
A. No, sir.

ATTY. ONGKIKO:
Q. Why not?

WITNESS SACAGUING:
A. Because Jessica Alfaro was never able to comply with her
promise to bring the man to me. She told me later that she
could not and the man does not like to testify.

ATTY. ONGKIKO:
Q. All right, and what happened after that?

WITNESS SACAGUING:
A. She told me, “easy lang kayo, Sir,” if I may quote, “easy lang
Sir, huwag kayong…”

COURT:
How was that?

WITNESS SACAGUING:
A. “Easy lang, Sir. Sir, relax lang, Sir, papapelan ko, papapelan ko
na lang ‘yan.”

xxxx

ATTY. ONGKIKO:
Q. All right, and what was your reaction when Ms. Alfaro stated
that “papapelan ko na lang yan?”

WITNESS SACAGUING:
A. I said, “hindi puwede yan, kasi hindi ka naman eye witness.”

ATTY. ONGKIKO:
Q. And what was the reply of Ms. Alfaro?

WITNESS SACAGUING:
 A. Hindi siya nakakibo, until she went away.
(TSN, May 28, 1996, pp. 49-50, 58, 77-79)

Quite significantly, Alfaro never refuted Sacaguing’s above testimony.

But what of Alfaro’s highly detailed and graphic account of the

incident? Didn’t that betoken the truth?

Only the truth that she was an avid newspaper reader, and the
newspapers reported the event “with dizzying details” and she was given
access by her NBI handlers to all the reports and evidence found in the crime
scene, said the Court.

“Was it possible for Alfaro to lie with such abundant details some of
which even tallied with the physical evidence at the scene of the crime? No
doubt, yes,” said the Court.

“Since Alfaro hanged out at the NBI offices and practically lived

there, it was not too difficult for her to hear of these evidentiary details and
gain access to the documents.”

Alfaro also gave some improbable details to give her account the
patina of credibility, such as adding that Hubert Webb threw a rock at the
glass on the door to break into the house when the door had in fact been left
open by his alleged girlfriend/victim Carmela and he was already through
raping and killing her and her mother and younger sister.

Well, what if Webb wanted to create the suspicion of a break-in?

 The Court noted that the house had been ransacked as though by
burglars but Alfaro had testified that the worst one of the accused had done
was rifle through Mrs. Vizconde’s handbag searching for the key to the
house whose door had been left unlocked and they were inside already.

Why look for a way into a house you are in already? The Court asked
of Alfaro’s testimony and could find only one answer: that was yet another
detail she made up.

The Court expressed shock that this and other self-contradictory and
nonsensical details were not appreciated by the trial court and the Court of
Appeals, especially the incident of her beating up someone in a police lineup
for threatening her and finding out she was beating up the wrong person.

“She ran berserk, slapping and kicking Michael, exclaiming: “How

can I forget your face. We just saw each other in a disco one month ago
and you told me then that you will kill me.” As it turned out, he was not
Miguel Rodriguez, the accused in this case.

“[The] thing about a lying witness: her story lacks sense or suffers
from inherent inconsistencies. An understanding of the nature of things and
the common behavior of people will help expose a lie. And it has an
abundant presence in this case.”

The Court also found it improbable that a habitual drug user could
have so vivid and perfect a recollection. Obviously, justices who voted to
acquit Hubert Webb et al have had no experiences with the mind-enhancing
properties of drugs. Why do you think law students take mind and memory
enhancers to cram for the finals and especially for the Bar exams and stay
drugged so as to stay alert to answer the questions by maintaining the
chemical condition in which they crammed all that learning.

If the justices who voted to acquit because they do not believe that
drug takers can think clearly, what of the justices who voted to retain the
conviction? Is it because they believe or they know that drugs do not impair
memory or reasoning even if it wreaks havoc with taste—like having sex
with the ugly guy next to you in the car? And what of the four justices who
abstained? They didn’t want the public to think of them one way or the
other? After all there is a large constituency of druggies out there who might
take offense at so derogatory a view of their mental capacities; quite a few
are media owners or children thereof.

The Court also dismissed the corroborating testimonies of village

security guards who could not remember every detail of everything that
happened to pass by their guard post that night. In the Court’s view, it is all
or nothing when it comes to memory. Either you remember everything or
you remember nothing but snatches of recollection are not possible.

This is the weak part of the Court’s reasoning, along with its attempts
to give psychological explanations to prove the improbability of events that,
on their face, anyway, could not have happened according to the laws of
physics, commonly observed human behavior in such circumstances, and are
narrated as eye-witnessed events by someone who did not deny that she told
the NBI she wasn’t in the crime scene in the first place to witness anything
with her eyes—but someone else was whom she could not convince to come
out.
 The final corroborating witness the Court dismissed was the
laundrywoman who claimed that she washed the bloodied shirt of Hubert
Webb, which she said she had picked up, along with other dirty laundry,
from the various rooms in the house at 4 a.m.

What a woman, even a laundrywoman, would be doing in anyone’s

bedroom at that early hour other than picking up her own clothes seemed
beyond the Court’s circle of credible belief. No one now recalls what the
laundrywoman looked like or her age or if she was at all fetching like
Mislang, President Noynoy Aquino’s malaprop speechwriter.

Was the US Secretary of State bought by Freddie Webb?

Said the Court: “March 9, 1991, Webb left for San Francisco,
California, with his Aunt Gloria on board United Airlines Flight 808.
Before boarding his plane, Webb passed through the Philippine Immigration
booth at the airport to have his passport cleared and stamped. Immigration
Officer, Ferdinand Sampol checked Webb’s visa, stamped, and initialed his
passport, and let him pass through. He was listed on the United Airlines
Flight’s Passenger Manifest.

“On arrival at San Francisco, Webb went through the U.S.

Immigration where his entry into that country was recorded. Thus, the U.S.
Immigration Naturalization Service, checking with its Non-immigrant
Information System, confirmed Webb's entry into the U.S. on March 9,
1991. Webb presented at the trial the INS Certification issued by the U.S.
Immigration and Naturalization Service, the computer-generated print-out of
the US-INS indicating Webb's entry on March 9, 1991, and the US-INS
Certification dated August 31, 1995, authenticated by the Philippine
Department of Foreign Affairs, correcting an earlier August 10, 1995
Certification.”

The rest of Webb’s US alibi consists of testimonies from friends and

relatives with whom he stayed and friends whom he met while in the US.
They could all be lying—but Madeleine Albright? Why?

Webb also presented documentary proof of a car his parents had

purchased for him and police traffic tickets he got while driving it.

“xxx

“As with his trip going to the U.S., Webb also went through both the

U.S. and Philippine immigrations on his return trip. Thus, his departure
from the U.S. was confirmed by the same certifications that confirmed his
entry. Furthermore, a Diplomatic Note of the U.S. Department of State with
enclosed letter from Acting Director Debora A. Farmer of the Records
Operations, Office of Records of the US-INS stated that the Certification
dated August 31, 1995 is a true and accurate statement. And when he
boarded his plane, the Passenger Manifest of Philippine Airlines Flight No.
103, certified by Agnes Tabuena confirmed his return trip.

When he arrived in Manila, Webb again went through the Philippine

Immigration. In fact, the arrival stamp and initial on his passport indicated
his return to Manila on October 27, 1992. This was authenticated by
Carmelita Alipio, the immigration officer who processed Webb’s reentry…”

Still, neither the trial court and the Court of Appeals were convinced
and rejected Webb’s alibi as weak. “Their reason is uniform: Webb’s alibi
cannot stand against Alfaro’s positive identification of him…. Because of
this, to the lower courts, Webb’s denial and alibi were fabricated.

So it was Alfaro’s word against Albright’s documentation. Alfaro won

and justice, in the view of the Court, lost along with 15 years in the lives of
the convicted Webb and his companions.

“But not all denials and alibis should be regarded as fabricated.

Indeed, if the accused is truly innocent, he can have no other defense but
denial and alibi. So how can such accused penetrate a mind that has been
made cynical by the rule drilled into his head that a defense of alibi is a
hangman’s noose in the face of a witness positively swearing, ‘I saw him do
it.’ Most judges believe that such assertion automatically dooms an alibi
which is so easy to fabricate. This quick stereotype thinking, however, is
distressing. For how else can the truth that the accused is really innocent
have any chance of prevailing over such a stone-cast tenet?

“A lying witness can make as positive an identification as a truthful

witness can. The lying witness can also say as forthrightly and
unequivocally, ‘He did it!’ without blinking an eye.”
 To overturn the defense of alibi, the contradicting testimony must
come from a credible witness, and witness is credible based on her past. Her
word is worth, to rephrase the Court, its weight in gold—or in lead or cow
dung if you wish though there would have to be a lot of that given the
density of gold.

What kind of past did Jessica Alfaro have? The Court said that it was
that of a stool pigeon for the cops.

Having established the witness’s credibility by a personal past of

truth-telling, a credible witness’s story must be, said the Court—unhelpfully,
we might add—“believable” and “not inherently contrived.”

Well, even lies are believable if you’re a good liar. Look at our past
presidents. Look at the present crop of presidential probables?

And what does “not inherently contrived” mean? As opposed to

outwardly invented?

Or did the Court really mean to say what it has been arguing all along,
that Jessica Alfaro’s testimony was, by its own internal logic, self-
contradictory and by common human experience, improbable and probably
fabricated—as opposed to the indubitable documentation of the US
Secretary of State that Hubert Webb was in a manner of speaking in her
bosom when the crime was committed. “A witness who testifies about
something she never saw runs into inconsistencies and makes bewildering
claims,” said the Court.
 Actually, Jessica Alfaro never contradicted herself. Her narrative was
a seamless narration of stuff she could have read in the newspapers and
could have been fed by her NBI handlers. The problem with her testimony
was not its inconsistencies or improbabilities nor even the vagaries of her
behavior nor the swings of her emotions. It was the fact that she did not deny
that all she claimed to have witness really came according to her from
someone who had really witnessed all the things she had testified to—but
which she herself had not seen and which she was passing off as her own
eyewitness account to save the NBI the trouble of finding that witness.

In short, it was a fight between what she admitted was hearsay and
could very well have been not even that but an NBI fabrication—and the
documentary proof of Madeleine Albright.

We think, nay, we would bet the farm—if we had one—on the

testimony of the US government than on the words of a police asset with a
big ass at that, if memory serves us.

On the other hand, said the Court, “[t]o establish alibi, the accused
must prove by positive, clear, and satisfactory evidence that (a) he was
present at another place at the time of the perpetration of the crime, and (b)
that it was physically impossible for him to be at the scene of the crime.”

Against all the quibbling about original passports, proper

authentication, etc., that the trial and appellate court’s made so much of so as
to dismiss Hubert’s alibi, the Supreme Court chose to believe:
 “The U.S. Immigration certification and the computer print-out of
Webb’s arrival in and departure from that country were authenticated by no
less than the Office of the U.S. Attorney General and the State Department.

“The U.S. Immigration certification and computer print-out, the

official certifications of which have been authenticated by the Philippine

Department of Foreign Affairs, merely validated the arrival and departure
stamps of the U.S. Immigration office on Webb’s passport. They have the
same evidentiary value. The officers who issued these certifications need
not be presented in court to testify on them. Their trustworthiness arises
from the sense of official duty and the penalty attached to a breached duty,
in the routine and disinterested origin of such statement and in the publicity
of the record.”

America trumps native courts, is how the proper headline should go—
and rightly so.

The Court’s conclusion deserves full quotation so as not to lose any of

its flavor.

“In our criminal justice system, what is important is, not whether the
court entertains doubts about the innocence of the accused since an open
mind is willing to explore all possibilities, but whether it entertains a
reasonable, lingering doubt as to his guilt. For, it would be a serious
mistake to send an innocent man to jail where such kind of doubt hangs on
to one’s inner being, like a piece of meat lodged immovable between teeth.
And what is this rank piece of meat the Court is referring to? Exactly what
this article divined: the nonexistent eyewitness for whom Jessica Alfaro
claimed to be standing in and delivery hearsay evidence in court. Hearsay, if
not fabricated evidence, that sent Hubert Webb and friends to jail for life of
which they already served 15 years.

As the Court so piquantly put it in italics: “Will the Court send the
accused to spend the rest of their lives in prison on the testimony of an NBI
asset who proposed to her handlers that she take the role of the witness to
the Vizconde massacre that she could not produce?”

No way, José!

It would be a white Christmas for Hubert and his friends, and not a
black and grey striped one as in 19 Christmases past if you include the four
years they spent in detention during the protracted trial of their case as the
NBI made up one new story after another to cover up for the biggest crime
of all: we never catch the real criminals in our country, although we do elect
some of them. —Teodoro L. Locsin, Jr.