Government

Politician questions pardons

LA PRENSA

Martín Torrijos959501

Members of the opposition are criticizing sentence reductions handed out by President Martín Torrijos in the days before Christmas.

Deputy José Isabel Blandón of the Panameñista party said that he is perplexed at why the president would include sentence reductions for two teachers convicted of sexually abusing a minor. The teachers, Yariela Gómez y Luz María Ayala, who worked in Coclé, served less than three months of a nine-year sentence before being pardoned by the president.

"This raises questions about the country's judicial system, especially when this government had made a commitment to punish these kinds of sex crimes," Blandón said.

Torrijos, through a decree issued by the Ministerio de Gobierno y Justicia, granted 104 sentence reductions. This has revived a debate on presidential pardons and sentence reductions, and whether or not that power should remain with the executive branch.

Article 184 of the Constitution stipulates that the president has the right to grant pardons, reduce sentences and order a prisoner to be paroled.

It is a privilege that has not gone unused in the past. In recent decades, former presidents Guillermo Endara, Ernesto Pérez Balladares and Mireya Moscoso were all generous with sentence reductions.

Endara, the country’s chief executive between 1990 and 1994, pardoned 758 prisoners. During Pérez Balladares’s presidency (1994-1999), 182 people were released early. Moscoso (1999-2004) released 170 people just days before completing her presidential term, including four Cubans who allegedly tried to assassinate Fidel Castro at a presidential summit held in Panama in 2000.