Of candidates, cases, and crimes:
Poll winners with pending cases

YOU CAN BARELY GET a decent job if you have a pending criminal case, in this age when just about every employer requires police and NBI clearances.

But that doesn’t seem to be the case when your employer is the Filipino taxpayer.

In its latest offering, the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism discovered that many winners in the 2013 elections (256 of them to be exact) have pending graft and criminal complaints pending before the Sandiganbayan. In fact, at least 17 of the winners have already been convicted by the graft court, and at least six of them had pleaded guilty or admitted to their crime.

Still, they ran – and won.

The story of the poll winners with pending cases is the result of painstaking research by the PCIJ’s research desk, which pored through thousands of documents provided by the Sandiganbayan and the Commission on Elections. By comparing Sandiganbayan case records from 1979 to the present, the PCIJ discovered a different kind of impunity, where those accused of very public crimes are allowed to assume or reassume public office.

Our sidebar is about the big fish who got away, very prominent officials who were charged, some of whom were convicted, but whose cases never gave them any serious jail time. In fact, some of them have run, and still continue to run, over and over again.