Senator Leila de Lima, who is currently detained, has written to the Department of Justice (DOJ) formally requesting that the drug cases against her be reviewed and that all charges against her be dropped immediately if former Bureau of Corrections (BuCor) chief Rafael Ragos’ retraction is found to be “true.”
De Lima emphasized the need to evaluate the drug cases filed against her in a May 5 letter to DOJ Secretary Menardo Guevarra “to determine if indeed these were prosecuted by the Panel of Prosecutors even after being told by Ragos that his testimony and all his allegations against me ‘are all lies’.”
Ragos, a former BuCor officer-in-charge, said in an affidavit certified in Pasig City on April 30, 2022, that he was “interrogated and pressured” into “admitting something that did not happen.”
“In paragraph 28 of said affidavit, it appears that the DOJ Panel of Prosecutors presented Ragos’s testimony in court knowing it to be false and fabricated. Ragos told the prosecutors that they should not expect him ‘to manufacture perfectly plausible testimony because these are all lies’ and that ‘the allegations against Senator De Lima never happened’,” De Lima wrote.
Detained De Lima asks DOJ to revisit her drug case
“This review should include the other case as well (Criminal Case No. 17-167) because if the Panel of Prosecutors that handles both cases are capable of suborning false testimony in one case, then nothing prevents them from doing the same in the other cases,” she added.
If the review finds Ragos’ recent statements to be “true,” De Lima has asked that the DOJ withdraw all cases against her immediately to “prevent a further miscarriage of justice” in which the DOJ “continues to prosecute said cases despite these revelations indicating prosecutorial misconduct amounting to the criminal offense of subornation of perjury.”
De Lima also asked the DOJ chief Guevarra to review “glaring facts in these cases which earlier on already indicated a premeditated conspiracy among DOJ and other high government officials to fabricate drug cases against me.”
She was arrested in 2017 while serving as the Justice Secretary on accusations related to the New Bilibid Prison drug trafficking scandal. Later that year, she was given the Liberal International Prize for Freedom.
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