Philippine Star June 7 2008 p. 18
It’s really hard to be faced with a decision involving your family and the law. As the case presented, the bank officials family was threatened to be killed if she hadn’t stolen the 4.3M pesos from the bank. What would a mother do in that situation, would she risk her family’s life and report to the officials or she will abide what the criminals said so that her family would be out of harms way. And it is very evident that as a mother she wouldn’t wish for something like that for her family. I cannot blame her for what she did because she really loves her family that’s why she’s been able to do that. I believe that Erlinda Ledesma should be acquitted of the charges against her on the defense that she was being maliciously manipulated by as yet unknown individuals to commit the crime in question. Put simply, the real perpetrators of the crime used her position in the bank and her natural human inclination to protect her family to indirectly rob the bank of P4.3 million.
We must look into this case in the perspective of moral responsibility. Moral responsibility entails that no one is responsible in an act if he/she could have done otherwise. It simply means that if a person has really no choice but to do the act even though it collides with law governing them, then he/she isn’t really morally responsible for it. To expound more, if one doesn’t desire something but takes it because he/she is forced by a third party because of implications like killing his/her family then he/she isn’t morally responsible for what ever the outcome. Now the question is could she (bank official) have done something otherwise than abide what the criminals wanted. Now, as a mother with her family on the line I do think she’ll do anything for her family to be safe and sound. We do think that Ledesma has no moral responsibility for what happened at the bank for she was just a mother protecting the life of her children. It is also stated here http://www.mindspring.com/~nisus/politics/MorResp.html, that moral responsibility loses its connection with morality when coercion enters the picture. Moral responsibility cannot exist without the ability to fail responsibility. Like light and darkness, neither can exist without the other. When our behavior is coerced, when there is no choice but to do that which is moral, morality no longer has anything to do with the issue and moral responsibility all but evaporates (http://www.mindspring.com/~nisus/politics/MorResp.ht
I therefore conclude with a statement taken from Sir William Blackstone in his Commentaries on the Laws of England that reads "the law holds that it is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer."
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