Raymund E. Narag, PhD
www.rappler.com
We must thank Jesus Crispin “Boying” Remulla, the new Ombudsman, for saying the quiet part out loud: inordinate delay is the true silent killer of justice. It kills without spectacle. No sirens, no headlines, no high drama. Just the slow strangulation of cases that never move, hearings that seldom happen, people who never get their day in court. It is not an abstraction.
While the pronouncement of the new Ombudsman pertains to cases filed against government officials in the Sandiganbayan, inordinate delay also affects cases of ordinary offenders. Thus, inordinate delay also refers to the mother who waits outside a jail gate, carrying plastic bags of food for a son presumed innocent but punished anyway. It is the docket that bloats, the judge who juggles 25 cases in a morning and decides, as if by ritual, to reset most of them. It is the jail cell designed for 10 but holding 60, each body counting time not by calendars but by postponements.
Inordinate delay does not merely inconvenience; it deforms justice into something unrecognizable.
The consequences are brutal and everywhere. We have built an archipelago of waiting rooms and called them jails. Persons Deprived of Liberty (PDLs) who are legally innocent become prisoners of the calendar. They wait two, three, five, even 15 years for a case to end. Many spend longer inside than the maximum penalty of the offense they are accused of.
I met a man who stayed seven years for a crime whose total maximum penalty was only three. He pleaded guilty during the pandemic, expecting immediate release — promised in open court — only to be lost in the bureaucracy while typhoons and floodwaters shut the courts down. Nobody heard him: no judge, no lawyer, no visitor. When he was finally “found” and set free, he had served four extra years for nothing. Multiply that story by thousands and you understand why congestion, cynicism, and quiet despair define our carceral landscape.
Delay punishes the poor most of all. Bail is a right on paper, but a wall in practice. Some trial courts list a labyrinth of documentary requirements — 16 items in one court we studied — before a detainee can even think of posting bail. Families who cannot marshal papers from far-flung barangays simply give up. Our data suggests nearly half of detainees are technically bailable but remain inside because the machine that is supposed to release them runs on forms, fees, and free time they do not have.
Meanwhile the state pays for food and custody day after day. It is bad justice and bad economics. When we reduced average detention time by even a few months in a Metro Manila jail, the government saved millions on food alone. The savings are not theoretical; they are rice on the table for schoolchildren who will never know their lunch came from a courtroom that finally started to move.
Inordinate delay also erodes belief in law itself. When people see senators, like Jinggoy Estrada, bailed out after years of detention while ordinary defendants rot for petty thefts, the message is simple: the system works if you can afford it. The public learns to cheer shortcuts. “Why not just kill the criminals,” some ask, “since they will beat the system anyway?”
This legal cynicism is the seedbed of extrajudicial fantasies. It is also a gift to the guilty who can play the clock. Post bail, delay, delay, delay, and then cry “violation of speedy trial.” Walk free because time — weaponized — has erased the case.
How did we get here? The causes of inordinate delay are not mysterious. They fall into three baskets: structural, organizational, and cultural. Together they form a machinery of postponement.
The structural causes are the bones and blood of the system: we lack prosecutors, public defenders, and judges. We lack courtrooms, staff, transport, and secure spaces to bring PDLs to hearings. We still have courts without reliable internet or equipment for remote appearances. We move people across flooded streets and paralyzed traffic in cities where a single downpour can shut down half a day’s calendar.
These are inadvertent delays. No one wakes up plotting to reset hearings because the patrol car broke down or the PDL escort is out sick; it simply happens when a system is starved. The structural deficit surfaces in every step: dockets overloaded because there are too few branches; bail hearings that drag because stenographers are missing; medical exams and forensic reports that take months to arrive because laboratories are understaffed. In a country where jails average 350 percent congestion, every unfilled court vacancy and every missing staff position translates directly into days, months, years behind bars for people not yet convicted.
The organizational causes are the habits and workflows of agencies that must move as one but often move as many. These are the unnecessary delays. Hearings are set, but notices do not reach the police or the jail. A PDL spends the morning shackled on a bench only to be told the prosecutor is in another sala, the witness was not subpoenaed properly, or the judge’s calendar has 22 other cases and the clock has run out.
Courts overcalendar to manage volume; then they reset because there is no material time to hear anyone fully. Dockets are mismanaged. Agencies operate in silos. We think of “case flow,” but we run case ping-pong: files bouncing among court, prosecution, defense, jail, and police with no shared tracker or accountability. In Metro Manila jails we examined, hearings are set every two or three months; of the four to six hearings on paper each year, one or two actually push through. That is a management problem, not a metaphysical one.
The cultural causes are the most corrosive because they hide under the banner of professionalism. These are the purposeful delays. We call it “professional courtesy” when we indulge a colleague’s motion to postpone for reasons that would barely excuse a tardy student. We call it “per appearance” fees when we normalize a business model that profits from slow calendars. Some lawyers are masters at attrition: fatigue the witnesses, stretch the intervals, watch memories fade and evidentiary value decay.
Some prosecutors treat pretrial detention itself as an informal punishment — why hurry if every week inside is time served without the trouble of proof? Some judges allow it all to pass because this is how it has always been done, and nobody wants to be the outlier who runs hearings like marathons and finishes cases. Culture is what we tolerate. We have tolerated delay.
These three strands — structural scarcity, organizational dysfunction, and cultural leniency — braid into the rope that strangles justice in the Sandiganbayan and beyond. In high-profile graft cases with multiple accused and armies of lawyers, the clock is the quiet ally of anyone who can afford strategy. In low-profile cases of ordinary defendants, the clock is the quiet executioner. Either way, time — not truth — wins.
What must be done? The answer is not a single silver bullet but a discipline of speed with integrity, applied at each layer of cause.
Structurally, we must expand capacity, yes, but we must also reengineer flow. Fill vacancies fast and rationally, and open more trial courts where caseloads demand them. Equip every sala for hybrid hearings so that witnesses and forensics officers are not hostage to geography and traffic. Fund dedicated transport and escort units so PDLs actually meet their calendars. Standardize and simplify bail across trial courts.
The sixteen-document scavenger hunts must end. Upon arrest, courts should conduct a custodial hearing within 36 hours to decide, on individualized assessment, whether the accused can be released on recognizance with conditions or must be preventively detained for clear, articulable risks. Treat bail as a tool to manage appearance and public safety, not as a price tag on liberty.
Organizationally, we must build a shared, living picture of every case. Start with a jail-to-court monitoring system that tracks, for each PDL, the date of arrest, the elapsed detention days, the statutory minimum and maximum penalties, and credits for good conduct, study, and teaching. Require the Bureau of Jail Management and Penology and provincial jails to submit monthly “Detainees of Interest (DOI)” lists — those above six months in MeTC cases and above three years in RTC cases — triggering joint case conferences among judges, prosecutors, and defense.
If a PDL has served the maximum penalty, release outright. If the minimum, release on recognizance with supervision. If the case is serious and past three years, set consecutive or “marathon” hearings until disposition. Courts should adopt case-processing time as a key performance metric. Identify the speedy salas and the challenged ones, study the differences, and institutionalize the practices that work. Overcalendaring must give way to disciplined, realistic dockets. A hearing set is a hearing heard.
Culturally, we must end the romance with postponement. Judges should exercise active case management, deny frivolous resets, and sanction dilatory practice. “Professional courtesy” should mean courtesy to the Constitution, not to convenience. Per-appearance billing must not shape the life of a case. Prosecutors must be evaluated not only by convictions secured but by timely prosecutions conducted. Public defenders must be resourced and trained to move for bail strategically, not to avoid bail hearings because they can lengthen cases. Bar associations and the bench must make it reputationally costly to be a merchant of delay and reputationally valuable to be a finisher. This is culture change: reward speed with integrity; stigmatize stall tactics.
We also need guardrails against the worst abuses of time. Adopt a strict-scrutiny trigger: any detention exceeding two years without conviction must undergo mandatory judicial review. At that point the question is not “Has the calendar been busy?” but “Is continued detention necessary and proportionate?” If the state cannot show clear flight risk or specific danger, release under conditions. The United Nations framework is clear: pretrial detention must be exceptional, justified, and regularly reviewed. We should treat that as a constitutional discipline, not a foreign suggestion.
In Sandiganbayan cases, where complexity is the rule, complexity cannot be the excuse. Build case maps at the outset — issues, witnesses, exhibits, timelines — and commit all parties to a sequenced plan with firm settings. Use hybrid testimony to lock in forensic and documentary evidence early. Where multiple accused strain calendars, sever cases when justice is ill-served by joint trials that turn a courtroom into a bus terminal. The public interest in accountability is not met by sprawling proceedings that stagger on for a decade and then collapse from exhaustion.
Bail policy must be reimagined as well. Replace the reflex of cash with a practice of supervision. Release on recognizance, with reporting conditions and barangay-level monitoring, works. Community bail support — when families, faith groups, or civic organizations guarantee appearance — works. We have seen it: people show up when the system treats them as citizens with obligations, not as ATMs with legs. The guilty should be convicted quickly and punished to the full extent of law. The innocent and the low-risk should not be warehoused while we look for a working photocopier.
Finally, measure what matters. Average time to disposition by offense and court. Percentage of hearings that push through as scheduled. Number of PDLs who cross the DOI thresholds each month and the action taken on each. Publish the dashboards. Sunlight is not a slogan; it is a management tool. When courts see themselves in the mirror of data, change is possible. When they do not, habit rules — and habit, in our system, is delay.
None of this requires a new Constitution. Much of it does not even require new law. It requires leadership and stubbornness. It requires the humility to learn from “speedy courts” and “speedy jails” that already exist, and the courage to confront the cultural comfort with postponement. It requires the Supreme Court to keep pushing continuous trial and justice-zone reforms, but also to demand results: not glossy plans, but fewer bodies in holding cells because cases actually end.
The stakes are not abstract. Every unnecessary day inside is a day of childhood a father misses, a job lost, a mind unravelling in a cramped cell, a taxpayer’s peso spent to feed someone who should be home, or already properly sentenced. Delay turns the presumption of innocence into a punchline, and the rule of law into a rumor. If we mean what we say about justice, then the calendar must stop being the weapon of the powerful and the whip of the poor.
So we need to thank the new Ombudsman, Boying Remulla, for identifying the problem. Now let us do the work. Fill the seats and equip the salas. Track the cases and face the numbers. End the rituals of postponement and restore the habit of finishing. Try and convict the guilty expeditiously and meritoriously. Free or supervise those who should not be inside. Make the clock serve the truth, not smother it.
When the machine of justice finally runs on time, we will have fewer prisoners who were never convicted and fewer convicts who were never tried. We will have jails that are not waiting rooms and courts that are not warehouses. We will have, at last, a justice system that punishes only after judgment — and never before it.
– Rappler.com
Raymund E. Narag, PhD is an Associate Professor in Criminology and Criminal Justice at the School of Justice and Public Safety, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale."
https://www.rappler.com/voices/thought-leaders/inordinate-delay-cases-silent-killer-justice/
