crime & the institutional economy of criminal processing & disciplining agencies in late colonial...

8/8/2019 Crime & the Institutional Economy of Criminal Processing & Disciplining Agencies in Late Colonial Philippines, 1930-

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TECHNICAL REPORT # 1 PART III

CRIME & THE INSTITUTIONAL ECONOMY OFCRIMINAL PROCESSING & DISCIPLININGAGENCIES IN LATE COLONIAL PHIILIPPINESUNDER US OCCUPATION, 1900-1935

CASE DIRECTORY & DATA-BASE OVERPENAL CASES TRANSACTED BY THE SUPREME COURT

OF THE PHILIPPINES, 1900-1935

2004 Virgilio RojasDept. of Economic History, Stockholm University, 106 91 Stockholm, Sweden,[email protected]

Abstract: This penal case directory and data-base covers a total of 750 radomly sampled criminal cases drawn on a five year interval basis

from the published proceedings of the Supreme Court of the Philippines during the American occupation between 1900-1935. It collates sets

of relevant parametric data which in sundry ways and levels help trace and track down structural and agency changes in late colonial criminalbehavior and criminal processing and disciplining institutions.

Three data sets are designed to address this task: a) Data set 1, gears towards structural trace elements of criminality, all of which feed into a

radomly sampled statistical reconstruction over time of as it were the broad landscape of late colonial criminal economy. b) Data set 2 has to

do with trace elements designed to map out and probe into what may analytically be labeled as the landscape of the institutional economy oflate colonial criminal processing and disciplining agencies. This set analytical employs the analogy of the integrated processing firm,

manufacturing & transacting relatively legally & procedurally secure & sustainable verdicts & disciplinary measures to contain & control

criminal action & behavior. In this sense, the court hierarchy, police, & penitentiary form interlocking divisions or departments in asyndicated criminal justice transaction & throughput system. According to this model hence, the life cycle of judicial-disciplinary

products (i.e. criminal acts transformed formally into penal cases transacted throughout the late colonial criminal justice system) is tracked

down through 3 sub-accounts or logs: the product velocity log (pvl), product standardization log (psl), and the product logistics log

(pll).c) Data set 3, straddles the landscapes depicted in the preceding two sets, by exploring psychic (affect) structures & their relationship

with the changing character of social interaction and space as a consequence of colonial encounters. It traces such socio-psychic landscapes

thru individual case profiling of inter alia: criminal motives, forensic (argumentative) assignment of liabilities & penalties, the social features

of crime scenes.

Finally, a directory and data-base key followed by critical notes on source, data retrieval and processing will round off the introductory text;

the former, to facilitate data search , the latter, to indicate source limitations, including a detailed inventory of explicit and implicit material-

specific biases. Besides noted data-base key, the respective page locations of the data-base columns (A-W) appear in the Table of Contents inthe preceding title page.

I. DIRECTORY & DATA-BASE PARAMETERS

Reconstructing structural and agency changes in criminal behaviour and colonial

criminal processing and disciplining institutions throughout the first 35 years

(1900-1935) of American occupation in the Philippines define the general

parameters of the current research project. Alongside a host of secondary

contemporary accounts, this task is empirically grounded on two major primary

serial sources: Report of the Philippine Commission-Report of the Governor
mailto:[email protected]:[email protected]:[email protected]


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General (RPC-RGG)1 and the Philippine Reports (published proceedings and

decisions of the Supreme Court of the Philippine Islands).

Broadly, structural parameters are understood here as patterns of criminality

defined and classified by colonial state statutes in currency (i.e. incumbent PenalCodes & Codes of Criminal Procedure). In an even wider sense it will also

imply mental, social, cultural & economic configurations inherent in such

patterns. Whereas agency parameters refer technically to institutional properties

like organisation, legal and disciplinary reforms and procedures which denote

specifically interlocking bureaucratic segments of the colonial state, viz.,

judicial, policing, and disciplinary agencies. Theoretically, strategic parametric

change in noted analytical units is seen here as a function of distinctive

encounters & the dynamics of negotiation evolving from the latter between

the colonial rulers and their native subalterns. Such encounters & negotiative

dynamics, will, as argued here, concurrently be reenacted or reflected process-

wise and multi-dimensionally at the levels of mentalit, social & institutional

practice, culture and economy.

Extractive work on the RPC-RGG material in Report # 1 Part I partially threshes

out these parametric changes, particularly in terms of agency. In a sense, this

serial source can be read as the institutional autobiography or logbook of the

caretaker civilian government, the Philippine Commission, although one written

from the rulers perspective, yet quite revealing in terms of conflicts and

resolutions arising from colonial institutional reforms in those bureaucraticsegments relevant to this study. The question of how these institutional changes

equi-historically jibe with and/or impact on colonial society and social relations

in the shape of criminal patterns is further addressed by the penal case directory

and statistical data-base presented in this third and concluding part of Report #

1. This data-base stems from a quinquennial random sampling survey of all

penal cases transacted by the Supreme Court of the Philippine Islands published

in the Philippine Reports between 1900-1935. It encompasses a total of 750

penal cases (514 and 236 of the sample lying respectively inside and instantly

outside designated quinquennial observation points), equivalent to 2519 JPegimage files or roughly 5038 pages.2

1 See Report # 1 Part I, 1.1, pp 8-65.2For particulars on mode of retrieval and reproduction of primary & contemporary sources see Rojas, Virgilio.Digital Archive: Late Colonial Historiography, The Philippines Under US Occupation, 1900-1935. Home

Page. 5 January 2004. 10 May 2004 . To be more

precise, it should however be noted that not all of the penal cases transacted by the Supreme Court (SC) saw

print, in fact many do not appear in thePhilippine Reports and still remain unpublished. Apart from those casesnow stored in and retrievable from this authors digital archive, some of the landmark SC decisions are also

electronically available and downloadable at: ChanRobles Virtual Law Library. Philippine Supreme Court

Decisions. 10 May 2004. Chan Robles Publications Co. 10 May 2004

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The Supreme Court (SC) proceedings from which this directory & data-base

derive do in sundry ways capture and integrate different facets of structure and

agency. Distinctively, these facets flow & radiate in two main directions from

the chain of narratives embedded in and encapsuled by the proceedings.Vertically, from the ensemble of information or case briefs volunteered by the

lower courts the local justice of peace courts (jpc) & the provincial or Courts

of First Instance (CFI) which in varying degrees of completeness include

information on the original complaint, preliminary investigation, evidence and

related deliberations by prosecution and defense, legal & procedural

conclusions, decision & penalty held by said courts.

Horizontally, the critical deliberations conducted by the concurring and at times

even dissenting Supreme Court justices in response to the appealing partys or

defendants assignment of errors to the lower courts decision, contain data on

either legal or procedural twists or both. This direction provides one with rich

information to suggest either strategic synchronization or shifts in institutional

coordinates (standard statutes & procedures), insofar as the assignment of

purported errors usually prompt citation and critical comparative discussions of

precedents, as well as either the reversal, affirmation or fine-tuning of previous

decisions made by the lower courts.3

II. DIRECTORY & DATA-BASE DESIGN

Certainly, the quality and quantity of parametric information along these

flows or layers vary from one penal case to another, yet the proceedings,

thanks to standard court reporting procedures, do contain a discernable set of

consistently recurring parametrically relevant data. The data-base taps into these

flows to systematically generate three distinct parametric data sets or

configurations.

DATA SET 1: THE LANDSCAPE OF LATE COLONIAL CRIMINAL ECONOMY

3 Directional or axial designations (vertical & horizontal) are employed here methodologically to distinguish

what are in fact parallell, multi- rather than single-stranded narratives that make up the proceedings. Thus,

vertically flowing information are those embedded narratives occuring in detached or cinematic time and

space; while movement along the horizontal axis refer to narratives running closer to real time & space. In the

context of the Supreme Court proceedings we trace vertically and horizontally moving narratives from,

respectively, any and all accounts & briefs originating from the lower courts & appellants andthose adducing,deliberating, concluding and sentencing portions produced by the Supreme Court justices themselves precisely

on the basis of said vertically as it were played-back or rerun accounts from the subordinate courts. For a

precursive, more sophisticated excogitation of noted concepts, see eg Gilles Deleuzes excellent recap ofBergsons notions of movement, image, recognition and time, (1991) Bergsonism.New York: Zone Books; TheCinema 2. Time-Image. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

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The first set has exclusively to do with structural trace elements of criminality,

all of which feed into a radomly sampled statistical reconstruction over time of

as it were the broad landscape of late colonial criminal economy.4 Trace

elements singled out and enumerated from the sample include inter alia: types(or the taxonomy) of criminal offenses, time & place of commission, class (orsocial status or persona), gender, civil status, ethnic or racial denomination of

offender and victim, number of offenders & victims, rate of recidivism &

habitual delinquency, rate and taxonomy of convictions & penalties imposed.

This statistical first set narrative moves chronologically and vertically down the

data-base columns.

DATA SET 2: THE LANDSCAPE OF THE INSTITUTIONAL ECONOMY OF LATECOLONIAL CRIMINAL PROCESSING AND DISCIPLINING AGENCIES

Flowing horizontally in contrast across the same we will find a second set of

trace elements designed to map out and probe into what may analytically be

labeled as the landscape of the institutional economy of late colonial criminal processing and disciplining agencies. The analogy through which theseelements are deployed here is that of an integrated processing firm,

manufacturing & transacting relatively legally & procedurally secure &

sustainable verdicts & disciplinary measures to contain & control criminal

action & behavior. In this sense, the court hierarchy, police, & penitentiary form

interlocking divisions or departments in a syndicated criminal justice transaction& throughput system. Upon entry into this system or institutional economy,

unclassified raw criminal acts or products are classified or eventually re-

classified, processed & refined into statutory and procedurally if relatively

standardized cases or judicial-disciplinary products. In terms of velocity &

level, product standardization & delivery i.e the degree & distance/time by

which verdicts, executory orders and the practical application or enforcement of

ditto approximate established templates or doctrines of law and criminal

procedure, and the delivery of such within a reasonable time frame will vary

more or less at interstitial or different points of the institutional economy at anygiven time.

Indeed, transaction and throughput efficiency, as roughly indicated by the

velocity and level of product standardization, do lend itself to strict economic

calculations of bureaucratic maintenance, overhead & operational costs, and

resource allocation analysis. Estimates indulging the issue of how strict

economic variables impinge on late colonial production and delivery of judicial-

disciplinary products, fall, however, by virtue of the nature and type of data

4 Defined here as the socially reproduced pattern or structure of crimes formally detected, apprehended,

classified & processed by late colonial judicial, policing, and disciplinary institutions.

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emanating from the proceedings, beyond the scope of this data-base. This issue

will suitably be addressed in a separate if parallel study of bureau-specific

budgetary, financial statements, & resource allocation reports available in the

other primary serial sources like the Census of the Philippine Islands 1903/1918

and RPC-RGG in Report 1 Part I, as well as contemporary appropriationsestimates.5

Instead, this data-base will cater to the seizure and apprehension of more non-

economic variables, a whole different set of potential6 effective costs or

practical constraints stemming from the process of institutional paradigm shift

(to new doctrines of law and procedure, new classification systems), technology

transfer (to new, purportedly more rational modes of organizing & managing

judicial, police & disciplinary power), socialization-hybridization7 effects

unravelling in the wake of new corporate cultures & related tension-

management (or ways of reconciling tensions arising from the push of learning

how to do the new bureaucratic culture versus the pull of resilient, time-

honored ways of doing things). Hence, noted second set of parametric data

5Letter of the Assistant Executive Secretary Transmitting to the Philippine Assembly Appropriation Estimates,

as Submitted by the Chiefs of Insular Bureaus for the Fiscal Year 1909 Together with Other Data RegardingRevenue and Expense Operations Concerning General Funds of the Philippine Islands for the Fiscal Years

1907, 1908 and 1909. (1908) Manila: Bureau of Printing. For a dry-run sample but more recent critical statisticalaccount of the economics of judicial institutions in the Philippines see Ibon Facts & Figures. The Philippine

Judiciary On Trial. Vol XIII, No. 15 (15 August 1990).6

The word (potential) deserves accentuation here as the real effects of the process of institutional revampsponsored by the US colonial government cannot be safely validated solo on the basis of the institutional account

provided by our data-base, unless a reciprocal comparison of institutional efficiency of the previous Spanish

justice delivery system is made. This task is reserved to a prefatory chapter drawn from existing relevant critical

literature on criminal, legal, bureaucratic history of the Spanish period in the Philippines. Some of the genres

most pioneering accounts for that period are provided by: Corpuz, Onofre D (1957) The Bureacracy in thePhilippines. Institute of Public Administration, University of the Philippines; Robles, Eliodoro G (1969) The

Philippines in the Nineteenth Century. Quezon City: Malaya Books Inc.; Bankoff, Greg (1996) Crime, Society,and the State in the Nineteenth Century Philippines. Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press. Thus

within the scope of this data-base we will confine ourselves to an account of potential effective costs or

practical constraints (as a result of contesting corporate cultural practices) on the American-led rationalising

institutional project as illustrated by changing procedures and legal reforms. The levy of constraints on the

American institutional project do originate not only from native subaltern resitance to American legal doctrines

and procedures, but also from segments of the American colonial community themselves. The latter explains forinstance why the American trial by jury model was never adopted in the Philippines; it was for all intents and

purposes viewed by many American expatriates as a bit far sophisticated if not a dangerous institutional device

for native predispositions to take stock of. See Rojas, Virgilio (2002) Civilizing Colonialism and Taming the

Criminal Savage Impression Management, and the Making and Un-making of Deviance and Discipline in Late

Colonial Philippines, 1900-1935. Paper Presented at the Graduate Seminar (28 Feb). Dept of Economic History,

Stockholm University.7 As a process, socialisation in new corporate cultures is by no means straightforward. As recent cultural

studies on mimicry & cultural hybridity in colonial encounters do suggest, tutelage in new colonial bureaucratic

theory & practice is more accurately read in terms of hybrid cultures, mixing elements of new and old, colonial

& native or previously mastered institutional models and practices. Seminal works in this genre are provided by

i.a.: Bhaba, Homi (1997) Of Mimicry & Man. In Cooper & Stoler eds. Tensions of Empire. Berkeley: UCP;

Gouda, Frances (2000) Mimicry and Projection in the Colonial Encounter: The Dutch East Indies/Indonesia as

Experimental Laboratory, 1900-1942. Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History. 1: 2; Benton, Lauren &Muth, John (2000) On Cultural Hybridity: Interpreting Colonial Authority and Performance. Journal ofColonialism and Colonial History. 1: 1.

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seeks to trace the outlines and direction of change over time in the institutional

economy in the sense of reciprocal corporate cultures a partial biographical

account of interactive institutional models and practices, if you like.

So tailored, the chronologically filed rows can be read like the micro-biographies or track records of individual penal cases transacting the broadcourse of the colonial criminal justice system. Through the case files one can

amply track down the life or product-cycle of each case along the horizontal

axis, as it enters, detours, refines, and exits the lower, middle, and higher circuits

(court-police-disciplinary hierarchy, cpd) of the system.

This cycle typically begins with a complaint filed by the offended party before

the local magistrate at the justice of the peace courts (jpc), who, with the aid of

the local police force, and later in ascending regularity the local sanitation and

health department physicians, will then conduct a preliminary investigation and

possibly an autopsy or medical examination, followed where necessary, by an

order of arrest and detention in the town jail of the suspected felon (s). Next,

criminal cases on appeal or review are duly referred to the regional or provincial

appellate Court of First Instance (CFI), where their legal or procedural merits

are considered and original decisions upheld, finetuned or overturned on the

basis of the briefs & transcipts submitted by the jpc, the prosecution and the

assignment of errors lodged by the appellant or defendant, all in resonance with

existing standards. As CFIs transact business regularly albeit less frequently, the

appellant or defendant is either held in detention in the provincial jail orprovisionally released on bail (when such practice eventually took root) while

the appeal is being processed.

Finally, contested CFI decisions or those involving capital felonies are appealed,

or, alternatively, by force of carryover praxis from the previous Spanish system

of criminal procedure, forwarded for review, before the higher appellate

Supreme Court (SC). At this terminal circuit, decisions are deemed final and

executory, at which stage it is adduced that even in the context of new evidence

produced by the appellant (s), quality-control or product standardization oflower court decisions have fully & duly been exhausted. SC decisions

(sustaining, nullifying in the case of acquittals, finetuning in terms of upholding

some but revoking other parts of lower court decisions & convictions) are

usually remanded for execution to the lower court from whence it originated. At

the point of execution, the hyphenated state (signifying the on-going product-

standardization process) of judiciary-disciplinary products ceases to exist,

ultimately exiting the system either as falsified judicial (acquittals) or purely

penal or disciplinary products (legally & procedurally standardized prison

terms, capital punishment, banishment, transportation, etc.).

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To trace the product cycle of each case, the following log designations can

be used to systematically group related categories of institutional data appearing

in the data-base.

a) theproduct velocity log (pvl) or an account of the time it takes for a caseto travel from one point of the court hierarcy to another (from the time theoriginal criminal complaint was issued, to the time appeals or reviews

were entered before the Court of First Instance and Supreme Court,

respectively, and ultimately to the time a decision by the Supreme Court

was rendered);

b) the product standardization log (psl) or the comparative account ofapplied standard deviations8 between different circuits (i.e. jpc-CFI-SC

hierarchy and its policing & disciplining extensions) of the criminal

justice system. Most extensively, this log helps juxtapose inter-circuit

applications of extant standards of criminal law and procedures as

deduced from among others: the classification and rubrication of criminal

offenses, the calculation and determination of criminal liability, as well

as, principal and subsidiary penalties and indemnities, employed practices

in for example lower court quality-checking transactions (thru review

procedures) with the Supreme Court, securing and deploying evidence,

the conduct of prosecution and defense, the exercise of appeal,

enforcement of arrest warrants and detention orders. In the case of

American occupied early 20th century Philippines and its concomitanthybridized brand of institutional re-programing & re-engineering of

colonial criminal processing and disciplinary agencies (where much of the

Spanish system was in fact retained or merely refurbished and where

indigenization gained ground first and fastest) towards modern, more

rational directions, it may logically be expected that synchronization

problems between new versus old institutional paradigms & practices will

abound, particularly during the early phase of adjustment, and should

increasingly decline as the new system takes hold towards the end of the

colonial mandate. By focusing applied standard deviations the log seeksto tease out the nature, form and location of tensions and constraints,

coupled with the modes of tension-management on the ground twin

instances generated by the encounter of contesting American versus

native corporate cultures in the process of late colonial institutional

change.

8 The term is used here in an analogical rather than statistical sense. Applied standard deviation in the above

context simply denotes the degree of dissonance of observed institutionl practices with incumbent colonialstandards of law and procedures in noted bureaucratic agencies. That degree will predictably be greater or lesser

in any one case and at any given point in time and space in the colonial criminal justice system.

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c) the product logistics log (pll) accounts for material and personnelrequisites of transacted penal cases, including among others: total number

of Supreme Court justices & ethnic composition (Americans vs Filipinos),

the prevalence and deployment of prosecution/state and defense

witnesses, forensic experts and medico-legal examiners in preliminaryinvestigations and hearings, the assignment & distribution of litigation

costs, the prevalence of bail.

Drawn from these data logs, individual case micro-biographies translate readily

into statistically composite annual caseprosographies9 or collective biographiesas we go vertically down the data-base. Eight such comparative prosographies

amalgamate at consecutive quinqennial points (1900, 1905, 1910, 1915, 1920,

1925, 1930, 1935) along a 35 year time-line to tell the full-length narrative of

long-run institutional change.

DATA SET 3: SIGHTING SOCIO-PSYCHIC LANDSCAPES AT THE INTERSTICESOF LATE COLONIAL STATE & SOCIETY

Finally, we log on the third set of trace elements, those projecting what may

generically be labelled associo-psychic landscapes. This last set tunes in on theinteractive if contentious colonial and native mentality-sensibility10 structures

and the social sites or spaces in which these encounters occur and operate. It

splices the analytical split imposed by design upon late colonial society and state

institution, structure and agency, in the preceding data-sets.

Thus, where the first set plots social tensions indirectly as articulated in

changing patterns of criminality in late colonial society, the second set depicts

those tensions operating rather inside criminal processing & disciplining

agencies themselves, as a result of intersecting corporate cultures (American

versus native bureaucratic think or mental, cognitive frames andpractices orways of transacting business within the criminal justice system) in the process

of institutional change. Data set 3 straddles these tension-sites by exploring how

both sync in with yet another possible source of tension psychic (affect)9 Otherwise commonly understood by historians as the collective study of the lives of a group of actors in

history, the term prosography as it is applied here denotes instead the collective history of individual case life

cycles in terms of contesting institutional practices by the late colonial criminal justice system in the

Philippines. For more literal applications of historical prosography see eg Gleeck, Lewis E Jr (1986) The

American Governors-General and High Commissioners in the Philippines, Proconsuls, Nation-Builders andPoliticians. Quezon City: New Day Publishers. For a recent critical state of the art review, see Cameron, Averil

ed (2003) Fifty Years of Prosography. The Later Roman Empire, Byzantium and Beyond. Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press. A fecund application of this method in economic history is provided by Gratzer, Karl (1996)

Smfretagandets villkor. Automatrestauranger under 1900-talet. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International.10 Deployment of the separate concepts of mentality and sensibility - i.e. the cognitive aspects of culture in terms

of mentalities and forms of thought versus ways of feelings, psychic structures arising from the former (in short,

emotions, sensibilities and structures of affect) takes its cue from David Garlands (1995) prescient criticalreview of Elias, Spierenburg etc in Punishment and Modern Society. A Study in Social Theory. Oxford:Clarendon

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structures & their relationship with the changing character of social interaction

and space as a consequence of colonial encounters.

Here, we draw from Garlands critical reflections (1995) on the theoretical

significance of cultural and psychic forces in historical studies of criminality andcriminal reform, dimensions which, as argued, do impose clear limits upon types

and extent of specific criminal reforms (e.g. penal) considered to be acceptable

within the frame of popular sensibilities. Refering to the works of Elias,

Spierenburg and others in the civilizing process fold of criminal historians of

early and late modern Western societies, he contends that such forces will

always be in tension with the instrumental, social control logic and functions of

specific penal forms embodied in modern criminal reform.11 For him, looking at

how affect structures affect the criminal reform process helps historical analysis

go beyond influential if somewhat over-rational, over-calculated approaches

to punishment like Foucaults power-knowledge technology concept and his

primarily political account of its evolution, one he keys mainly on the functional

requirements of social control.12

The need to home in on socio-psychic landscapes to make more accurate

readings of criminality & criminal reform is all the more compelling in the

colonial context, where there is logically bound to be relatively greater or

sharper disjunction between rulers and ruled in terms of mentalit and psychic

predispositions. Moreso at historic junctures when declining imperial powers,

like the Spanish, with their decrepit criminal justice systems give way to newregimes with modern civilizing projects, like enlightened imperialism a l

United States in the Philippines circa early 1900s.

Reasonably so, such disjunction would be sharpest at the point of transition,

when ruled populations were now being obliged, via a whole range of

institutional reforms, to superimpose on otherwise naturally and equi-distantly

aged or evolved mentalities and emotional predispositions (internalised in a

span of more than 350 years of Spanish rule), constrastingly novel worldviews,

modes of expressing feelings, and ways of organizing social life incubated andhatched somewhere else. Consequently, although some of these early American

reforms did not cause much ruckus, even appearing to attract popular

approbation (e.g. mass education), some, like attempts to revise & modernize

the Hispanic criminal justice system in favor of its allegedly more rational US-

made equivalent, did antagonize sentiments as well as trigger off strong

symbolic resistance among segments of native and Spanish lawyers and court

functionaries. Ironically, rational reform proposals were sometimes effectively

aborted on account of the anxiety and aversion they were causing among

11 Garland, ibid.12 Ibid.

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frequency one can pick up affective echoes from the rebuttals made by both

offending and offended parties (commonly natives of either sex) through

counsel, on the one hand, and those emanating from the judges evaluation of

the former, on the other. Where criminal motives are critically discussed, one

captures the sense of tension in one direction when some motives more thanothers manifestly evoke greater repugnance in the evaluative arguments; in yet

another direction, the rebuttals may give a rough outline of native socio-psychic

pre-dispositions in a whole range of issues like sexuality, machismo and the

ethos of violence, the concept of face and honor, race, authority and

discipline. In similar vein, certain classes of crime or forms of social deviance

more than others tend to offend colonial judicial sensibilities, often exacerbated

or mitigated by the judges pre-conceptions and dispositions vis-a-vis properties

like class, social status, gender, age, ethnicity. Synchronically, therefore, this

channel registers tensions operating in native society and culture at large and

those originating within court institutions through the gaze of agents of

colonial authority evaluating and making sense of native offenders, criminal

motives & types, a gaze mediated by their distinctive socio-psychic furniture.

Channel 2 logs on tensions issuing from court discourses on criminal liabilityand penalty. The tandem questions of social debt in equal proportion to the

payment (punishment) for injuries caused on person, property, honor, sexuality

& state are often the object of controversy and re-standardization in most of the

decisions drawn by the Supreme Court. The frequency of these errors or

applied standard deviations (as denoted in Data set 2) in lower court decisionsoccurs in a hybridized context characterized by a modicum of American

procedural reform grafted unto largely recycled Hispanic standards of blame and

punishment as well as operational procedures (Penal Code & Criminal

Procedure). Under such conditions, it is not unusual to find a few American

judges and court personnel in the awkward position of simultaneously trying to

interpret and apply standards that at times might even go against the grain of

their own cognitive frames let alone socio-psychic predispositions about what

should appropriately be rational and civilized measures of blame and

punishment or for that matter the most effective and legally secure mode ofdelivering justice. Of course, this tendency should be greater in the lower than

higher court circuits, as the latter is staffed by reputed American and native

experts in Hispanic and US law and procedures.

Beyond this type of disjunction, the Supreme Court proceedings do echo other

nuances of socio-psychic tension at this frequency. Some of those nuances

emerge in the forensics (argumentative exercise) of re-standardization and re-

calibration of liability and penalty, specially, though not exclusively, when the

final decision arbitrarily depart (even as this refer elsewhere in the text toestablished precedents) from common-sensical, stereo-typical or lexical

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(dictionary) notions (the judges) of for instance: level of moral education or

ignorance, sexual morality and chastity, justifiable violence,

dependents or minors, gender, time and space, passion and self-

gratification, inclination to prevaricate or dissimulate, to name only a few.

All these notions, applied by and suggestive of the judges socio-psychicinclinations, enter into the formal decision forensically via the critical assaying

and allocation of mitigating and aggravating circumstances. Ultimately, exact

measurement of penalty derives from the final ratio between these two

circumstances. In this sense, mentality-affect structures like invisible ink sets a

powerful mark indeed onto judicial decisions that ipso facto are thencedeployable as recognized authorities or precedents for future cases.

The mediating function of inclinations can similarly be observed in related

forensic evaluations of witnesses and other evidences. It should be noted

however that what we are dealing here with are essentially cinematic

evaluations or re-evaluations of lower court evaluations of witness evidence. In

the latter, beyond corroborating facts, the reliability or veracity of witness

testimony is often largely infered by the judge from sense impressions of

witness demeanor in court. Insofar as higher court judges do not have this

opportunity, they are thus forced to rely on the accuracy of their lower court

peers inferences. Tensions may register at this point when the latters

conclusions are rejected. Otherwise the record shows they were often admitted,

in which case the contagion of potential socio-psychic biases would have been

transmitted upwards in the hierarchy from lower to higher court. Those biaseswill probably be American increasingly shifting to native in origin, as we go

from early to late phases of American colonial rule.

Basically, tensions captured through this channel are those inside the hierarchy

of colonial institutions, operating among proprietors at different levels of the

colonial gaze, gazing at the gaze, so to speak.

Channel 3, shifts the locus of sightings largely in favor of native society by

focusing on court accounts of crime scene and the immediate social environmentwhere the crime was committed. Scenographic reconstruction at this frequency

will include details on: the various protagonists in the criminal drama, their

social persona (class, status, gender, ethnic denomination) and position, how

they acted out respective roles in relation to the alleged crime, the public mood

on site, personal and social injuries caused, how preliminary investigations,

through the local police force and sanitary and health department under the

direction of the justice of the peace, worked out on the ground, and many more.

Our intention at this frequency is to be able to get at least a rough reading of

typical collective and individual mentalit and emotional structures in localsociety, structures presumably leaving their trace on the crime and social scene.

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Certainly, here, as in other readings, we are aware of potential biases in the

accounts, but fortunately enough those very biases, where they are discernable

in the text, are the very signs that squeel on the hidden structures we seek.

III. DIRECTORY & DATA-BASE KEY

COLUMN DENOMINATION LEGEND DESIGNATION(GENUS orLOG)

PAGELOCATOR

A Year of transaction ofpenal case

Transaction time inchronological order

Data set 2:Institutionaleconomy,

Product velocitylog

1-50

B Month & day of penalcase

Transaction time inchronological order

Data set 2:Institutionaleconomy,Product velocitylog

1-50

C Name of appelleeversus Name (s) ofappellant (s)

Colonial state versusdefendant(s)

Technical formatof report

1-50

D Case & page number Loci in Supreme Courtdocket & PhilippineReport

Technical formatof report

1-50

E Remitting court(Justice of Peace-cum-Court of FirstInstance circuits)

Court-cum-geographicaldeparture point of penalcase transacted by theSupreme Court

Technical formatof report; Dataset 1: Place ofcommission ofcrime

1-50

F Type of transaction: Review, Appeal orMotion to Dismiss

Data set 2:Institutionaleconomy,Productstandardization

log

1-50

G Classification (RC) Rubrication of offense,concomitant decision,penalties, liabilities by(RC) remitting Court ofFirst Instance(& where indicated, bythe justice of the peacecourts)

Data set 2:Institutionaleconomy,Productstandardizationlog

1-50

H Classification (SC) Reiteration orrestandardization oflower court

classifications,decisions, penalties on

Data set 2:Institutionaleconomy,

Productstandardization

1-50

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legal & proceduralmerits by the SupremeCourt

log

I Decision/Judgement Affirmation, reversal,modification of lowercourt decision bySupreme Court,assignment ofcircumstances &arguments; distributionof dissenting versusconcurring, abstainingjustices & arguments

Data set 2:Institutionaleconomy,Productstandardizationlog

51-100

J Sentence Restandardization &finetuning of penalties;assignment of costs bySupreme Court

Data set 2:Institutionaleconomy,Product

standardizationlog

51-100

K Judges (no. &nationality)

Size & ethnicdistribution of SupremeCourt justices

Data set 2:Product logisticslog

51-100

L Year: complaint :appeal lodged:decision held (crimecommitted)

Time of caseconception: successiveinter-circuit chain ofcourt decison, appeal,decision (Time allegedoffense was committed)

Data set 2:Product velocitylog

51-100

M Occupation (victim or

complainant/respondent)personality/status

Class/profession

alternatively statusgroup or socialpersonality of offendedparty

Data set 1:

Criminaleconomy as afunction ofclass/socialstatus orpersonality

51-100

N Occupation(defendant)/personality/status

Class/professionalternatively statusgroup or socialpersonality of offendingparty

Data set 1:Criminaleconomy as afunction ofclass/socialstatus orpersonality

51-100

O Gender(victim/complainant)

Male/Female Data set 1:Criminaleconomy as afunction of sex

101-150

P Gender (defendant) Male/Female Data set 1:Criminaleconomy as afunction of sex

101-150

Q Civil status(victim/complainant)

Married, single,dependent or minor

Data set 1:Criminal

economy as afunction of

101-150

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demographics

R Civil status(defendant)

Married, single,dependent or minor

Data set 1:Criminaleconomy as afunction ofdemographics

101-150

S Age(victim/complainant)

Age when offenseoccured


101-150

T Age (defendant) Age when offenseoccured


101-150

U Nationality

(victim/complainant)

American (Am),

Chinese (Chin), Filipino(Fil), Brit (British), Eur(European)

Data set 1:

Criminaleconomy as afunction ofethnicity

101-150

V Nationality(defendant)

American (Am),Chinese (Chin), Filipino(Fil), Brit (British), Eur(European)

Data set 1:Criminaleconomy as afunction ofethnicity

101-150

W Case Profile (SightingMental, Social &Institutional- Scapes)

Highlights tensions as afunction of mental-psychic or affect

structures & specificsocial spaces wherecolonial & nativeencounters (criminaljustice colonial officials,subalterns, criminals,victims, witnesses)occur & operate

Data set 3:Sighting Socio-Psychic

Landscapes

151-200

Note: The abbreviated entry, dna, appearing in the data-base cells further on indicates data notavailable.

IV. CRITICAL NOTES ON SOURCE, DATA RETRIEVAL &PROCESSING

The Philippine Reports (PR) compiles and publishes cases determined in theSupreme Court of the Philippine Islands. The first volume came out in 1904,

covering cases transacted between August 8 1901 and February 20 1903. The

insular Supreme Court then was headed by a native Chief Justice and 6 associate

justices (2 natives and 4 Americans), under which served an American attorney-

general, a native solicitor-general, and one American reporter. In the first

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volume and subsequent ones, the table of contents usually includes: an

alphabetical list of cases reported as well as those cited in the reports.

In the immediately adjacent reference list are found consecutive indices on

citations and references from: articles of the civil code, penal code, code of civilprocedure (old and new), code of commerce, general orders of the military

governor of the Philippines, mortgage law, and miscellaneous statutes. For the

purpose of the study, strictly penal cases were selected. Save for the initial

period (1901-1904), selection was done on a five-year interval basis: 1905,

1910, 1915, 1920, 1925, 1930, 1935. Notably, the earliest phase of the American

occupation (1899-1902) was marked by a war of pacification and tantamountly

by the precedence of military over civilian courts. Civilian colonial rule and

judicial institutions were to be re-established in 1902 when the American anti-

insurgency campaign officially ended. Emblematic of this brief transition period

and its implications on the civilian judicial process, Volume I of the Supreme

Courts Philippine Reports was not to see print until 1904, two years afterhostilities ceased.

Extraction covered all penal cases reported in complete sets of volumes for

selected years as indicated in the table below (with the exclusion of cases

occuring in the overlapping months of the years immediately preceding and/or

succeeding selected year):

YEAR VOLUME (S)

1901 1 (August 1902 February 1903)

1905 4-5 (April 1904 September 1905;

September 1905 March 1906)

1910 14-18 (August 1909 January 1910;

January March 1910; March

September 1910; September

December 1910; December 1910

March 1911)1915 29-33 (December 1914 February

1915; March October 1915; October

December 1915; December 1915

February 1916)

1920 40-41 (August 1919 March 1920;

March 1921)

1925 47-48 (December 1924 September

1925; September 1925 March 1926)

1930 54-55 (October 1929 October 1930;October 1930 August 1931)

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1935 61-62 (December 1934 August 1935;

September 1935 January 1936)

Collation of cases proceeded systematically in the following mode: to beginwith, penal articles with their corresponding page designations enumerated in

the reference index Article of the Penal Code Cited or Referred To in this

Volume, were distilled, or deflated, i.e. as there was no necessary

correspondence between penal articles cited and absolute number of penal cases

reported in the volume. Either several articles could very well be cited in the

same case reported, or several cases reported cited the same penal article. Thus,

one first had to determine the pages registering one or more penal articles, on

the premise that those cited in a particular page and adjacent pages would most

likely indicate the location of at least one or two adjacent penal cases reported,depending on the actual length of the corresponding case proceedings (length of

proceedings can vary from half or a whole page to tens of pages). A numerically

ordered page table by year/volume was created, and hits per cited penal article

tabulated accordingly. Using noted page hit list as compass, a systematic if

cursory perusal of the corresponding case proceedings followed, to effectively

determine actual number and chronology of individual penal cases contained in

the Reports. Having distilled or deflated penal cases in this manner, they

were then extracted, filed, and catalogued chronologically.

In sum this tedious process was designed: first, to enable one to determine moreexactly the absolute number of penal cases reported in the volume, insofar as the

relevant index volunteered information on penal articles cited alone rather than

transacted penal cases per se; second, to expedite chronological photographic

retrieval of selected cases from ditto. Selected cases were finally digitally photo-

graphed and stored in JPEG image-files, an inventory of which appears at the

end of this report.

A similar technical problem was encountered in determining the absolute

number of all cases reported, i.e. inclusive of all case categories (penal andcivil), insofar as these were listed alphabetically under the names of both

complainant/appellee and defendant/appellant. Here, the total number of cases

could be fixed after eliminating double-accounting instances, as it were.

Further, one should also bear in mind that there is necessarily a time-lag

between the actual commission of crimes, the judicial processing of those crimes

in the lower courts, the appeal and final litigation and resolution of the same by

the Supreme Court. In the analysis and reconstruction of crime frequencies and

trends over time therefore a certain degree of bias may enter into the data

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depending on how huge the gap is inx number of cases for any of the designatedyears under observation.

Last but not least, it is important to note that the cases included in the survey do

not even remotely approximate the total number of penal cases handled by thewhole gamut of colonial courts (Supreme Court, Courts of First Instance, justice

of the peace courts) throughout the Islands; cases accepted and transacted by the

Supreme Court, the highest appellate court, were of course those with

extraordinary legal & procedural relevance or precedence and would tend as

such to constitute only a small fraction of the total cases transacted by the

insular court system as a whole. Not to mention the fact that the Philippine

Report itself do not publish all penal & civil cases processed by the Supreme

Court. Furthermore, procedural reforms introduced by the Americans were

designed to impose stricter limitations on Supreme Court case throughput as an

antidote to notable dilatory workings of past Hispanic colonial judicial systems.

Having noted the limitations, the Supreme Court proceedings have nonetheless

few if no parallels among judicial sources in terms of providing unbroken serial

data on criminal and civil cases processed by the insular court system

throughout the American colonial period. Lower court proceedings for

concerned period were as this author understands largely both unpublished and

destroyed during the Second World War. A visit by the author at the Dept. of

Justices archives in Manila in the Spring of 1998 lent credence to this view,

suggesting indeed the main confinement of documentary availability at lowercourt levels to the postwar era. Municipal and provincial court archives appeared

to replicate this post-war orientation.

SUPREME COURT PENAL CASES : IMPLICIT & EXPLICIT BIASES

Through the course of digesting the text of the court proceedings the following

inventory of explicit and implicit biases burgeoned. No attempt to systematically

register the frequency of these biases has been made. The following numberedlist is therefore an initial, raw enumeration of flaws. It may later be further

refined. Otherwise, we will for the moment retain the raw character of the

inventory to emphasize the need to exercise caution from drawing unqualified

general conclusions from the current serial source.

1. Commonly, CFI decisions in criminal cases are final and executory, unless

appealed from. Thus in general only a fraction of total criminal cases are

admitted and transacted at SC level, and only those containing unsettled if

controversial issues of law and procedure in relation to evidence and penaltiesimposed.

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2. Crime perpetrated in group where some of those convicted waived appeal

before SC.

3. Victim/complainant of/to crime are duly documented, but criminal act in factaffected a larger group or several individuals.

4. Crime perpetrated in group, sentenced by CFI, but some defendents died

before appeal/review was brought before the SC.

5. Crime in group arraigned separately, but only some were entered at SC level.

6. Date of decision in lower court or date of lodging of complaint usually

specified, however it is sometimes difficult to distinguish the two when only

either one or the other is specified; greater omission of information on date of

actual commission of crime. So beware: the statistics will show criminal trends

for say the first interval 1901-1905, resting on some cases that in fact occured 20

yrs ago and during the previous regime. If the frequency of such cases is

relatively high in the sample, then the resulting trend will actually represent that

of the previous period, not the current one.

7. Data on gender and nationality, presumed and usually not clearly spelled out.

It is of course easier and more straightforward to extrapolate gender than

nationality from the names appearing in the proceedings. For nationality, oneneeds to read through the proceedings to make a more informed guess, insofar as

the text usually does not volunteer such information beyond those rare occasions

when American citizens were involved in the criminal case.

8. Data on age, civil status, and occupation are sporadic or simply excluded. By

and large only inferences and very rough estimates are possible. Thus, where

occupational data, basically an economic designation were unavailable, the

victim/complainant's as well as defendant's "personality" were recorded. The

latter understood in terms of the social relationship defining the victim/complainant-defendant dyad at the time the crime was commited (eg debtor-

creditor, suitor-wife etc).

9. Several crimes committed by one person or same crime committed by several

persons, where not all cases are argued.

10. Some crimes/cases acquitted or dismissed on the basis of legal or procedural

technicalities, among which many in fact might have been true.

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11. Some crimes might not have been true or really ever happened in reality, but

were litigated and sentenced at lower court anyway.

12. Lag between time of actual commission and formal litigation of crime.(see

5)

13. Population under observation refer mainly to number of cases rather than

number of actual perpetrators of the crime.

14. Name of convicted criminal (s) appear as defendant/appellant together with

the designation et al (i.e. and others), although the individuals concerned are

deceased, and the et al who are still alive are the actual subjects of the case

under appeal or review.

15. In some cases, victims or complaining witnesses were proven to have filed

suit on questionable grounds such that after a reversal of judgement or acquittal

the defendant proves to be the actual victim of judicial murder, if you like. E.g.

a defendant is convicted of and sentenced for robbery in CFI. It turns out that he

had a legal warrant to enter and impound specific property from the house of the

complaining witness who had taken the action. In this context as acquittals

based on legal and not merely procedural grounds will tend to corrupt statistical

data on crime, they should either be eliminated from the count or at minimum

properly noted.

16. Cases where crimes other than those included in the complaint were, in the

process of review or appeal, deemed to have occured and thenceforth remanded

to prosecuting atty for proper action. E.g. Arresting officer in pursuit of robber

indiscriminately detains both suspects and victim of robbery, during which the

officer concerned commited theft.

17. Same case appealed and deliberated several times during the same year leads

to multiple accounting of single crime for that period.

18. If the defendant does not appeal for whatever reason from CFI judgement

SC doesn't have any power to change the decision, even if it should find strong

indications of innocence. Such convictions stick and are thus included in rather

than eliminated from criminal statistics had the case been appealed and re-

examined by the higher court.

19. Some crimes (brigandage, robbery in band, some cases of murder &

homicide commited "en cuadrilla") sometimes or often conflate with politically

motivated activities, particularly during the early 1900s; some, not all, of thesecases were dismissed by virtue of the 1902 general amnesty. Such cases were

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written off as criminal acts, others which might have been dismissed remain in

the statistics.

20. Case within case, where one offense leads to sequential multiple offenses (eg

defendant sentenced for robbery, imprisoned, escapes and while doing that heassaults and kills the guard; he is later captured, tried and found guilty of

assassination)

21. Supreme Court cases are in essence cases of already convicted crimes under

appeal or review; the tip of the criminal statistical iceberg, the legally and

procedurally controversial cases.

22. Some cases are merely attempts or non-consummated criminal acts.

23. Some criminal cases are camouflaged by civil cases ex post facto. So

criminal cases we might not see in the statistics are actually there but had been

transacted in the form of civil damages suit. (E.g. civil action to claim damages

in previous criminal suit which plaintiff claims to be malicious prosecution.)

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TECHNICAL REPORT # 1 PART III

CRIME & THE INSTITUTIONAL ECONOMYOF CRIMINAL PROCESSING &DISCIPLINING AGENCIES IN LATECOLONIAL PHIILIPPINES UNDER USOCCUPATION, 1900-1935

CASE DIRECTORY & DATA-BASE OVERPENAL CASES TRANSACTED BY THE SUPREME COURTOF THE PHILIPPINES, 1900-1935

2004 Virgilio RojasDept. of Economic History, Stockholm University, 106 91 Stockholm, Sweden,[email protected]

TABLE OF CONTENTS

I. Directory & Data-base Parameters III. Directory & Data-base Design ... III

Data Set 1: Landscape of Late Colonial Criminal Economy IVData Set 2: Landscape of the Institutional Economy of Late Colonial

Criminal Processing and Disciplining Agencies IVData Set 3: Sighting Socio-Psychic Landscapes at the Interstices

Late Colonial State and Society .. VIIIIII. Directory & Data-base Key . XIIIIV. Critical Notes on Source, Data Retrieval & Processing . XV

Supreme Court Penal Cases: Implicit & Explicit Biases XVIIIV. Data-base Columns

A: B-H . 1A: I-N .. 51A: O-V . 101A: W . 151

VI. Overlapping penal & civil cases instantly outside observation points . (1-8)
mailto:[email protected]:[email protected]:[email protected]

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