Trampling the anti-vagrancy law
By Carlos Isagani Zarate
Inquirer News Service

"ALL I NEED TO MAKE A COMEDY IS A PARK, A policeman and a pretty girl," the famous British director and actor, Charlie Chaplin, wrote in his autobiography. In popularizing his famous character in "The Tramp," Chaplin gave face to a vagrant, transforming this Depression-era comic character into a well-loved and caring persona that moviegoers, then and now, identify with.

Chaplin's "The Tramp" has since become an icon of a vagrant's triumph against difficulties and persecution. Yet, if "a park, a policeman and a pretty girl" are the ingredients for Chaplin's comedy, in our country today, many find in them a typical situation ripe for tragedy-especially among girls and women considered as vagrants or, worse, prostitutes.

For example, from January to June this year, more than 300 cases were filed against persons considered as vagrants-mostly women and children-in Southern Mindanao. Hundreds of similar other cases are still pending in various courts in the region.

A vagrant is variously defined in the Revised Penal Code as "any person having no apparent means of subsistence," or "found loitering around public or semi-public buildings or places" without visible means of support, or "any idle or dissolute person who lodges in houses of ill-fame." The definitions are vague and open to broad interpretation.

Take the case of Vangie and Krystel. In November 2003, the two were apprehended by police officers in Davao City as they "wandered and loitered around San Pedro and Legaspi Streets without any visible means to support" or "lawful and justifiable purpose." Actually, the police officers suspected that they were commercial sex workers, but for lack of evidence that they engaged in prostitution, both were instead charged with vagrancy under Article 202 of the Revised Penal Code. Theirs could have been one of many similar cases, where the arrested women simply pleaded guilty and paid the fine imposed.

But Vangie and Krystel opted to fight it out. Last year, they petitioned the regional trial court to declare Article 202 of the Revised Penal Code unconstitutional, on the ground that its definition of vagrancy is "vague and overboard" and violates the Constitution's equal protection clause. Last July 29, the two "vagrants" got a favorable decision from Davao RTC Judge Virginia Europa.

While admitting that there is "no decision of the Supreme Court that may be found as guide" in resolving the constitutional question of the country's anti-vagrancy law, Europa cited the case of Papachristou vs. City of Jacksonville in the United States. In the said case, the US Supreme Court struck down a city ordinance -- "which was much more detailed than Article 202 of the Revised Penal Code" -- as unconstitutional for its vagueness, and for the danger of "arbitrary and erratic arrests and convictions" it opened to.

Just like the Jacksonville ordinance, Europa ruled that Article 202 gave police officers too much "latitude for arbitrary determination as to who should be arrested and who should not."

"Loitering about and wandering have become national pastimes, particularly in these times of recession where there are many who are without visible means of support, not by reason of choice but by force of circumstance as borne out by the high unemployment rate in the entire country," Europa said. "To authorize law enforcement authorities to arrest someone for no other reason than the fact that she cannot find gainful employment would indeed be adding insult to injury."

Europa also ruled that the anti-vagrancy law, passed in the 1930s, also "runs afoul of the equal protection clause of the constitution as it offers no reasonable classification between those covered and those who are not."

Although Europa's decision is yet to be upheld by the Supreme Court, it has been lauded by many women's and children's rights advocate. "We hope that the Supreme Court will uphold Judge Europa's precedent-setting decision," commented lawyer Angela Librado-Trinidad, chair of Davao City Council's committee on children and women. She bewailed the fact that the anti-vagrancy law has long been used by police authorities as "an excuse to arrest and charge" women and children.

"Armed with vagrancy laws that give them arbitrary powers to round up children, the police haul them to the station and subject them to physical, verbal and sexual abuse," Tambayan, a Davao City-based NGO that helps street children, reported in one of its studies.

Bills seeking to decriminalize vagrancy are now pending in Congress. Among them is House Bill 4436, authored by Bayan Muna Rep. Joel Virador. The bill seeks the total repeal of Article 202 of the Revised Penal Code, which criminalizes prostitution.

"The country's worsening economic crisis would impel the birth of more and more vagrants and prostituted persons unless decisive actions are taken by the government to strike at the roots of the problem. The lack of employment (opportunities), gainful or otherwise, (available) to millions in the country forces them to ply (sic) themselves," Virador said. Hopefully, our country's tramps, as in Chaplin's movies, will also triumph in the end.

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ATENEO LAW HOMECOMING. A grand reunion of all the graduates of the Ateneo de Davao Law School is scheduled on Oct. 22, 2005 at the covered court of the Ateneo de Davao University, Jacinto Street, Davao City. This is the first ever alumni homecoming of the Ateneo de Davao Law School since it was established in 1966. The gathering will start with a Mass at 2 p.m. at the Jacinto Campus Chapel. The Mass will be followed by a motorcade along the city's major thoroughfares.

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