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Prosecutors raid the PTJ
The difficult process of getting a new party on the ballot
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Panama doesn't want Posada Carriles back
Panama News Briefs

Public Ministry raids the Judicial Technical Police

by Eric Jackson, mainly from other media

On the afternoon of August 11, about a half-hour before most of the technicians and detectives who work at the Judicial Technical Police (PTJ) crime lab would ordinarily go home after a day's work, a team of prosecutors swept into the Ancon PTJ headquarters and ordered the people in the lab to step back from their work stations and leave the premises. Thus began a raid that lasted into the night, and was continuing some four hours later when this reporter passed by to go to the play at the Ancon Theater that's next door.

That night it was reported on the television stations that the raid was about false certifications. A few weeks earlier, some PTJ officers had been caught in the act of falsifying a foreigner's criminal record, erasing criminal convictions that would create problems obtaining a residency visa. This, however, was apparently not the sort of false certification about which this particular raid was concerned.

Instead, the first thing that the prosecutors reportedly did was to dust certain pieces of lab equipment for fingerprints.

Why do that, in a false certificate case?

Because it seems that the false certificates were diplomas issued by the Academia Colombiana de Criminalistica y Fotografia Investigativa. Prosecutors had learned of the problem when a PTJ lab technician complained to them of paying $400 for a course there, then learning that what was involved didn't include study or classes or tests, but just the issuance of a certificate. Upon further review, it turned out that a number of PTJ officers were working with certifications from that Colombian academy, and that the Ministry of Education had certified the institution as a legitimate school. The prosecutors were dusting various pieces of lab equipment to build a series of cases in which the allegation would be in the nature of "you were working on that apparatus, but the diploma you used to qualify you to work on it was bogus."

Prosecutors also seized a number of computers from PTJ headquarters, which might shed light on any number of situations in addition to fake credentials.

In Panama we only have certain vestiges of the rule of law, despite the best attempts of a number of good people to rescue our legal institutions from the grip of bribery and influence peddling. That means that, except when the rich and powerful are caught in criminal activity and we can be reasonbably sure that there will be impunity, the legal consequences of any particular situation tend to be unpredictable. Anywhere else in the world, a scandal of this nature would hold the potential of terrible chaos, as persons convicted on evidence that includes lab tests by people with bogus credentials challenged the verdicts. Understand that this was the nation's crime lab and that a large percentage of Panama's prisoners are behind bars for drug offenses in which the PTJ lab's identification of substances as illicit drugs formed a crucial part of their cases. However, in cases of decisions handed down by unqualified judges it has been held that aggrieved parties must not only prove that the jurist was not competent to hand down the decision, but also that the decision was intrinsically faulty. A similar legal theory might leave drug identifications or other lab evidence produced by unqualified people among the bodies of convicting proofs.

Attorney General Ana Matilde Gómez told El Panama America that along with the raids at PTJ her people were also conducting judicial inspections at various PTJ branch offices, the nation's detective academy and at various offices of the Ministry of Education.

Looked at as part of the genre of fake diploma cases, this matter joins a body of cases, which includes:

·         a Los Santos judge and member of the politically powerful Arrocha family who was removed after years of serving on the bench with a fake Colombian law degree;

·         a pending criminal case in which a former student and several administrators at the University of Panama are facing charges for falsifying a diploma;

·         questions about the University of Panama rector's own doctoral degree, which appears to have been purchased rather than earned;

·         a scandal at the Land Transportation and Transit Authority and a driving school wherein people were being issued chauffers' licenses without meeting the requirements;

·         a case uncovered last year by investigative reporters from El Panama America wherein a Panama Oeste night school was selling high school diplomas and transcripts; and

·         a series of cases arising from the improper sale at Panamanian consulates abroad of seafarers' certificates, the most notorious of which was the sale of a first mate's certification to an undercover labor activist investigator who was required to show no proof of his purported ability.

Sometimes it seems as if the academic credentials of the entire nation have been impugned.