The Supreme Court has affirmed the murder conviction of three police officers for the 2017 killing of 17-year-old Kian delos Santos during an anti-drug operation in Caloocan, ruling that the teenager was defenseless and unlawfully killed.
In a decision, published on December 22, 2025, the Court found police officers Arnel Oares, Jeremias Pereda, and Jerwin Cruz guilty of murder, sentenced them to up to 40 years in prison, and ordered them to pay delos Santos’ family 275,000 Pesos in damages.
The Court ruled that Delos Santos was unarmed, forced to hold a planted gun, and shot multiple times, rejecting police claims of a shootout. It upheld the rulings of the Regional Trial Court (RTC) and the Court of Appeals but modified the penalty for the police officers by removing the phrase “without eligibility for parole,” explaining that this restriction applies only in cases where the death penalty is justified, which it found not applicable in Delos Santos’ case.
Senator Risa Hontiveros, along with human rights advocates, welcomed the ruling but stressed that justice must go beyond the conviction of the three officers. She noted that thousands of families have suffered similar losses and expressed hope that they, too, would eventually find justice.
Government officials and lawmakers renewed calls for an independent truth commission to investigate extrajudicial killings linked to former President Rodrigo Duterte’s so called “war on drugs” and hold higher authorities accountable.
Critics have pointed to conflicting decisions, such as the Supreme Court’s dismissal of charges against police in a 2016 Payatas operation, raising concerns about persistent gaps in domestic justice for drug war victims. Efren Morillo, the lone survivor of the said 2016 operation that killed four of his friends, had his criminal complaints against the police officers dismissed by the Ombudsman in 2023. The ruling was upheld by a division of the Supreme Court last November 2025.
The families of Morillo and his friends filed a petition on December 5, 2025, to elevate the case to the Supreme Court en banc.
The case of Morillo is emblematic for the International Criminal Court (ICC) as he is one of the very few eyewitnesses who survived the killing among the at least 27,000 extrajudicial killings linked to Rodrigo Duterte’s “war on drugs.” His case was also stated by the ICC in its decision, authorizing the investigation into the human rights violations in connection with the “war on drugs” in 2021.
Morillo and his lawyers Joel Butuyan and Gilbert Andres are now questioning why the mastermind behind the “war on drugs” is detained in The Hague but those who carried out the killings locally remain unpunished.
Photo © Raffy Lerma