Last Oct. 9, three-month-old infant River Nasino died of bacterial infection at the Intensive Care Unit of the Philippine General Hospital (PGH) in Manila. 

The baby died in the absence of her mother Reina, who has been in detention for illegal possession of firearms and explosives since her arrest in late 2019. According to accounts, the baby was conceived prior to her mother’s arrest but grew inside the womb while her mother suffered the loneliness of detention.

The squalor in our detention facilities is by itself a continuing violation of the Constitutional ban against cruel, degrading and inhuman punishment. A mother’s protective womb is no match to the filth, sub-human nutrition, and nonexistent pre-natal care provisions in this country’s overcrowded detention cells.

Moreover, it is the duty of the State under the Constitution to equally protect the life of the mother and the life of the unborn from conception.

It was sometime in November 2019 when Reina Mae Nasino, along with two other supposed youth organizers, were arrested in Tondo, Manila, for alleged possession of guns and explosives. One grenade can make the offense non-bailable.

The arrest was made by the police while implementing a search warrant issued by a court not located in the City of Manila, which obviously has jurisdiction over Tondo, but in Quezon City which is a neighboring city in Metro Manila.

It was a Quezon City regional trial court judge who issued the search warrant. The National Union of People’s Lawyers have called this judge out for alleged rubber-stamping of police-initiated search warrants, thereby enabling law enforcement agents to proceed almost unmolested in their campaign against activists and red-tagged opponents of government.

To recall, it was the same Quezon City judge who issued the search warrant implemented at predawn in Ozamiz City, Mindanao in July 2017 that resulted in violence and mayhem, leaving 15 people dead, including the city’s Mayor Reynaldo Parojinog Sr.

Much earlier, in late 2016, Sen. Richard Gordon called on the Supreme Court to impose sanctions on a judge based in Samar who issued a search warrant against a prison compound in Leyte that was holding Albuera, Leyte’s Mayor Rolando Espinosa Sr. We all know what happened to Mayor Espinosa.

Sadly, these cases demonstrate how a search warrant can tragically turn out to be a death warrant in a matter of minutes.

Police agents normally file their applications for a search warrant in a court within whose territorial jurisdiction a crime was committed. It is only for “compelling reasons” that an application may be filed in another court, but still within the judicial region where the crime was committed.

In 2009 the Supreme Court empowered the Regional Trial Courts (RTC) of Quezon City and Manila to hear search warrant applications with respect to illegal possession of firearms and other crimes. These warrants may be served outside the jurisdiction of Quezon City and Manila, by way of exception to the rule.

In January this year, a Bacolod City RTC dismissed similar cases for illegal possession of firearms filed by the Criminal Investigation and Detection Group against six activists arrested in raids in Bacolod City in October last year also on the strength of a search warrant emanating from Quezon City.

The Bacolod Judge ordered the release of the detainees after lamenting that more than two months had lapsed since his directive for the CIDG to produce the records supporting the search warrant application. The police failed to comply.

Search warrants seem to be easy to procure, yet government finds difficulty in processing the evidence after the police conduct their operations.

This reflects the truly depressing common situation for detention prisoners who continue to waste away while awaiting trial on non-bailable offenses. They suffer the bane of a notoriously slow process despite the constitutional guarantee of a speedy disposition of their cases.

In the case of Reina Mae Nasino, the added ignominy is that of an infant child unable to take on the outside world after growing in the womb fed with fear, uncertainty and State neglect.

It is time for a serious re-examination of our rules if our courts of law are to give true meaning to the fundamental principle behind the constitutional guarantee against unreasonable searches and seizures, i.e., that the ordinary citizen is the master of his own home and can refuse admission even to a king./WDJ