Judicial firepower
I have become convinced that among the many defects of our rulers is the absence of imagination. I am referring to a specific kind of affliction, the inability to view one’s institution and its place among other institutions, from a perspective broad enough to include the past, and wide enough to consider the reasons for the institution’s being, besides what it actually does. A case in point is what might seem a minor decision by the House some years back to ape the executive by having people in marching band uniforms serve as a kind of interior ceremonial guard in the premises during one State of the Nation Address.
I remarked to a then-legislator that this contravened the deepest-held principles of parliaments, going back to the so-called Mother of Parliaments, the House of Commons, which jealously guarded its prerogatives to be free from physical intimidation ever since King Charles I tried to arrest some MPs, helping to ignite the English Civil War. It is symbolically respected by the executive in our case, with military honors being rendered by the military to the president, outside the Batasan, since soldiers, however high their rank, can only enter upon invitation.
The legislator’s eyes glazed over, of course, and I recall some sort of nonsensical but expected rejoinder to the effect that we’re not British, which is beside the point. I was reminded of this narrow-minded lack of imagination upon seeing that Congress had enacted the law, the President had signed it, and the Supreme Court even issued implementing rules and regulations (IRRs), establishing judicial marshals.
We are, perhaps, more familiar with court sheriffs who have existed since the American colonial era: they execute writs, serve processes, and implement judgments. They operate under judicial control and are authorized to use reasonable force and can request police assistance but have never been, and are not, a dedicated, armed, law-enforcement service.
On April 8, 2022, then President Rodrigo Duterte signed Republic Act No. 11691, creating judicial marshals; on Aug. 20, 2024, the Supreme Court approved the IRRs for the law, which came into effect on Dec. 11 of that year. The law itself had first been proposed by Chief Justice Diosdado Peralta to address killings not just of lawyers but of judges.
What’s interesting—and troubling—is both the logic and the provisions of the law. The logic of the law is supposedly to assert judicial independence and achieve security for the courts. The assassination of judges and court personnel, the sponsors of the law argued, was continuing unabated and, worse, remained unsolved. To continue to depend on the Philippine National Police, the proponents further argued, would keep the judiciary vulnerable to violence and political pressure. Since the Constitution granted administrative supervision over all courts to the Supreme Court, it seemed logical for Congress to create an organic security force under the supervision and control of the Supremes, who would be freed of having to rely on another branch for their own safety. Judicial marshals would thus provide armed security, undertake threat investigations, and render limited assistance to court processes. Sheriffs would continue to execute civil judgments and processes.
Here, our lawmakers deviated from what had, from the start, been the model for the proposed marshals in the first place: the system of United States Marshals. That system retains the entire chain of command for the marshal service in the executive department, where all police and military power lies. What Congress and the presidency agreed to do, by contrast, was create a separate, independent, armed force, answerable only to unelected judges. No one then, and now, with the sole (self-interested, to be sure, but he still had a point) exception of Sen. Ronald “Bato” dela Rosa, who abstained from approving the law, seems to have cared that the judiciary now has a private army.
Because this is the point: finding the police feeble, or corrupt, or incompetent, or all of the above, Congress’ solution was to create a private army for a judiciary never before (here, and never before, anywhere else, for that matter) expected to wield armed might. “When the guns speak, the law falls silent,” how often have lawyers and judges both repeated this, ad infinitum and ad nauseam? So what happens when the guns speak on the orders of an unelected judge? With incredibly broad powers: a national force covering the entire judiciary; command that does not pass through the interior or justice departments or even the police; concurrent jurisdiction to investigate crimes against judges, staff, or court property; the power to arrest, conduct searches, carry firearms, issue mission orders, and even run its own academy.
The US, South Korea, and Ukraine have internal police-type units reporting directly to their Supreme Courts, but their powers are far more limited, their ability to operate much more circumscribed: mostly, they only cover the Supreme Court, not all courts; in Korea they cannot even conduct arrests.
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Email: mlquezon3@gmail.com; Twitter: @mlq3
