Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, September 3) — The lawyer of the family of slain transgender woman Jennifer Laude on Thursday questioned a local court’s order to prematurely release US Marine Lance Corporal Joseph Scott Pemberton on the basis of exemplary behavior.
The Olongapo City Regional Trial Court’s Branch 74 on September 1 said Pemberton should walk free for his good behavior. He has served over five years and eight months of his 10-year maximum jail sentence. The court credited to him a good conduct time allowance of 1,548 days or more than four years. This yields an accumulated jail time of 10 years, one month, and 10 days, the court said.
But the Laude family’s counsel, Virgie Suarez, said the good conduct time allowance (GCTA) law was applied to Pemberton’s case without clear proof that he was well-behaved and participated in rehabilitation activities while in jail, adding it did not comply with the provisions of the law.
“What was presented was a mere certification that he has a good conduct. That certification even came from the US guards,” she told CNN Philippines.
In the implementing rules of the Republic Act 10592, inmates who display “good behavior and [have] no record of breach of discipline or violation of prison rules and regulations” are eligible for GCTA.
The lawyer said some steps were skipped in the computation. She said there was no recommendation from the management, screening, and evaluating committee, which should be the basis for the decision of the time allowance supervisor who forwards the computation to the court.
“What was considered was the computation made by Pemberton, that is another clear injustice… [The court should] order Pemberton to continue serving his sentence because (of) lack of material basis for application of GCTA law ” she stressed.
Suarez said the release order cannot be carried out yet because she filed a motion for reconsideration on Wednesday, which has yet to be resolved. She added that, if it can be proven the Pemberton showed good conduct while in detention, he still has to serve 10 months with the proper calculation of the law.
Pemberton’s counsel, Rowena Garcia Flores, is unfazed by the motion for reconsideration filed by the Laude camp. She believes the American Marine will be released from a special military facility in Camp Aguinaldo soon as the motion filed is a “mere scrap of paper.”
She said that once Pemberton is a free man, he will return to the United States and continue his studies.
How Pemberton’s jail time was cut short
Pemberton in June filed an urgent motion for the Bureau of Corrections to compute the time he served in jail by applying the good conduct time allowance law. In August, Pemberton appealed for his immediate release, claiming that the BuCor failed to give him a year’s worth of GCTA since it did not include in its computation his preventive imprisonment from October 22, 2014 until November 30, 2015.
The Olongapo court granted Pemberton’s partial motion for reconsideration and ruled that he should be given GCTA during the one-year period. The court also took note that Pemberton already paid the Laude family the full amount of ₱4.65 million in civil damages.
In October 2014, Laude was found dead in an Olongapo City motel room after a night out with Pemberton, who confessed to killing her after finding out she had male genitalia. Laude’s neck was blackened with strangulation marks, her head rammed into a toilet.
The high-profile case was brought back to the spotlight when President Rodrigo Duterte moved to terminate the Visiting Forces Agreement between the Philippines and United States early this year. With the abrogation, Pemberton should be transferred to the state penitentiary in Muntinlupa, presidential spokesperson Harry Roque said in February. The VFA remains in effect since the Duterte government suspended the termination amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
CNN Philippines’ Eimor Santos contributed to this report.
