THE dismissal by a Muntinlupa City court of all the remaining drug charges against former senator Leila de Lima last week and the conviction of four police officers earlier this month for the killing of a father and son during the bloody war on illegal drugs raise serious questions on how justice was pursued in former president Rodrigo Duterte's administration.

In February 2017, the Department of Justice, then under Vitaliano Aguirre II, filed three separate drug cases against de Lima. Relying mostly on the testimony of convicted drug offenders, prosecutors alleged that de Lima benefited from the illegal drug trade inside the New Bilibid Prison. She was later ordered detained at the custodial center inside Camp Crame in Quezon City.

Four years on, the court junked the first of the three drug cases against de Lima, and in August 2022, confessed drug lord Kerwin Espinosa retracted his allegations against her. The government case continued to crumble in May 2022, when former corrections officer in charge Rafael Ragos also recanted his statements against de Lima, saying Aguirre had threatened him into making those allegations. By May 2023, another Muntinlupa court junked the second case against de Lima on the grounds of reasonable doubt.

De Lima's vindication was final when she was cleared of the third drug charge for the prosecutors' failure to prove the guilt of all the accused beyond reasonable doubt.

While it is tempting to point to this as an example of the justice system working, it is no small matter that de Lima spent seven years of her life — many of those in detention — to finally shake free of what now appear to be flimsy, trumped-up charges.

Aguirre's reaction to the dismissal of the charges was stupefying.

"That has been expected for a long time," he told an online news service. "As I said before, I am happy for this development, as she has suffered enough already."

Today, seven years after the charges were first filed, we are compelled to ask who or what caused Aguirre to file such weak cases. How he answers these questions may well address the suspicion among some quarters that the previous administration may have filed criminal cases to harass and silence its political enemies.

Meanwhile, we welcome the conviction of four police officers who killed a father and son during the Duterte administration's war on drugs. Luis and Gabriel Bonifacio were 45 and 18, respectively, when police barged into their home on Sept. 15, 2016, then ordered Luis' wife Mary Ann Domingo and their three minor children out of the house as he was on his knees while Gabriel begged them not to hurt his father. Neither of them was armed, investigators later found. Mary Ann then heard gunshots from inside the house. Father and son were killed by multiple gunshots.

It was touching to hear Mary Ann say that "justice still exists" following the verdict handed down by a Manila court, but any satisfaction we derive must be tempered by the fact it took eight years to obtain a conviction and that only low-ranking officers — and not their superiors who ordered the drug raids — were included.

More seriously, the latest convictions bring the total number of police officers successfully prosecuted for extrajudicial killings to only nine — a dismally low figure, given the thousands of suspects killed without a trial during the war on drugs that was the centerpiece of the Duterte administration.

Official police records say more than 6,000 people were killed in the war on drugs, but human rights groups estimate that tens of thousands of mostly poor men were killed by police officers and vigilantes, even without proof that they were linked to drugs.

What, we might ask Aguirre and the subsequent officials who followed him in the Justice Department, were they doing to bring justice to the thousands of other victims of extrajudicial killings caused by their fatally flawed approach to bringing the drug menace under control?

Duterte and his officials have made it a point to say the country has a functioning legal system to oppose the involvement of the International Criminal Court in investigating their administration's war on drugs. But with thousands killed and only nine foot soldiers in the police force convicted, this is not a track record that inspires confidence that those who led us into this misguided "war" in the first place would finally be held legally accountable.