“Sloppy” police work and poor compliance with the rules on handling evidence resulted in acquittals for 284 drug cases in the first five months of 2025, some of them filed during the deadly anti-narcotics campaign waged by then-president Rodrigo Duterte.
Among those acquitted were Jerome Gaje and Bryan Salceda, who were arrested by the police in a buy-bust operation in Makati City in January 2022 based on an informant’s tip.
Gaje and Salceda denied the charges, saying they were framed.
A Makati City court convicted the two in 2023, sentencing them to life imprisonment and ordering them to pay a fine.
The Court of Appeals (CA), however, found “glaring gaps” in the chain of custody or how police handled the seized drugs, leading to the acquittal of Gaje and Salceda on May 30, 2025.
Gaje and Salceda’s case is just one of 284 drug-related acquittals handed down by the CA from January to May 2025, a figure that already exceeds the 2018 total of 257 acquittals, based on data from the Supreme Court Office of the Spokesperson.
More broadly, since 2016, when Duterte enforced a ruthless anti-drug campaign, drug case acquittals at the CA and the Supreme Court steadily increased.
What emerged was a trend that lawyers said can be traced to “sloppy” police work, such as failures to comply with strict legal requirements. — The Philippine Daily Inquirer/ANN
