The Value of a Life

I had intended to write this a couple weeks ago but the San Bernardino terrorist attack captured everybody’s attention first. The day before in Olongapo City a Filipino judge issued the sentence and verdict of US Marine Lance Corporal Jacob Scott Pemberton in the murder trial of a transgender prostitute named Jeffrey Laude, who went by the name of Jennifer. Pemberton got shafted. He’s paying for his own actions to be sure, but it’s much more than he deserved.

In October 2014 the USS Pelilieu made a port call at Subic Bay in the Philippines. Lance Corporal Pemberton and three of his shipmates went on liberty into Olongapo City to go bar hopping and look for girls. Pemberton was twenty, not even old enough to legally consume alcohol in the States, but such laws don’t matter here and the US Navy has always had a cavalier attitude about its personnel drinking and shopping for whores.

Pemberton and his friends wound up at a dingy gin joint near the end of Magsaysay Blvd. near the Rizal roundabout called the Ambyance. Several girls hit on the group and Pemberton left the bar with two calling themselves Barbi and Jennifer. Pemberton has been described by his shipmates as a nice kid who had never been in trouble. He was obviously too nice and too naive to be left alone with not one, but two women of the night, but his friends (I use the term loosely) let him go off to have a good time.

Barbi and Jennifer took Pemberton across the street to an adult’s only hotel frequented often by prostitutes. It’s a dirty, run down, classless establishment that makes one wonder why anybody would go there at all unless they were already half drunk. The three got a room while a bellboy watched the hall.

After a while Barbi left and only then as Jennifer disrobed did Pemberton find out she was in reality Jeffrey. Embarrassed and horrified Pemberton yelled at Jeffrey who then slapped him. Pemberton feared Barbi and maybe others had set him up and would be coming back, but as he tried to get dressed Jeffrey tried to slap him again. Pemberton then put him in a headlock and choked him before dragging him into the bathroom where he dropped him on the floor.

Pemberton got dressed and left, and turned himself in at the ship, but claimed Laude was still breathing when he left the hotel. The next morning Laude was found dead with his head in the toilet and a necklace and chain clasp in one hand. He had also been robbed as his wallet and jewelry he was known to be wearing was missing.

A Mexican standoff followed. Philippine officials refused to let the ship leave until Pemberton was handed over. The ship at first refused, but after several days an arrangement was made where Pemberton would remain in US custody in the brig at Camp Crame, a Philippine army base in Manila near the US embassy and the Pelilieu finally sailed.

The situation then took on soap-operatic proportions. A German man named Marc Schulbach, a fat slob of a guy with no brains, showed up claiming Laude was his fiancée. He went to the mortuary complete with a TV news team to record the event, and wept over the casket claiming the whole story was false. Jennifer would never cheat on him, he declared.

After Pemberton was transferred to Camp Crame Schulbach went to Manila, found a way to climb over the wall onto the base and was arrested by the military police. In a show of false bravado he shouted that he was going to kill Pemberton. Then he tried to rough up the MPs while they escorted him off the base. He finally apologized and offered to just go home, but his passport was confiscated by immigrations until deportation proceedings sent him home. Under the deportation law he is banned from ever returning. Nothing has been heard from him over here since, but it has come out that the TV News station had actually flown him to the Philippines and took him to the mortuary in Olongapo to manipulate the event on the stipulation that they be the only ones Schulbach would tell his story to.

As it turns out, Laude was a notorious drug addict, thief and con artist who regularly worked in tandem with Barbi and other transgenders in Olongapo. He also was the primary source of income for his mother and family. But most disgusting of all, his mother had encouraged his lifestyle because of the money he could make. She offered to drop the charges if Pemberton would pay her 100 million pesos, which amounts to over 2.17 million dollars.

The Philippine courts, however, would not, and could not in order for justice to be served, drop the charges. The trial began in March and the verdict and sentencing was announced December 1. Pemberton was found guilty of homicide, but not murder, because intent to murder could not be proven. He was sentenced to six to twelve years minus time served in a Philippine national prison, and ordered to pay the Laude family 4.6 million pesos, about 98,000 dollars, for potential lost income.

Pemberton was to be remanded to the Philippine prison system as a “national” because of a law that states any foreigner sentenced to over three years would be considered as a national and therefore incarcerated in the Philippine prison system. He was ordered to the New Bilibid prison, a deplorable facility used for political prisoners. The US embassy immediately contested the ruling and refused to turn Pemberton over. The Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) with the Philippines stipulates that in such a case where a US serviceman is involved the United States must approve of the facility where he will be held. After long discussions Pemberton was returned to Camp Crame while negotiations are made for his future imprisonment.

It is a sad story, full of contradiction and hypocrisy. The Philippine government had to take someone to trial in order to show that life is not taken for granted in the Philippines. Unfortunately an American was the pawn in a game designed to show that the Philippines respects law and order. When it comes to prostitution, however, that respect apparently goes out the window. It has always been this way. Prostitution is illegal, and regardless of all the talk about law and order and respect for life, nothing is being done to clamp down on prostitutes and transgenders or their sordid scams taking advantage of unwitting foreigners who fall into their clutches.

While the circumstantial evidence is against Pemberton, he claims he did not kill Laude, and the prosecution was unable to prove that he did. Because of that a murder charge was lowered to homicide with a lesser penalty, but the only thing the prosecution was able to prove was that Pemberton was there and Laude was dead. There was DNA evidence of an unidentified third party, and the chain in Laude’s hand did not belong to Pemberton. The defense argued that this unknown third party might have killed Laude, but the bellboy in the hallway claimed no one else had entered the room that night. Of course, the bellboy could have entered the room that night. It’s hard to imagine that he could not have heard the shouting match going on in the first floor room of this dinky, drafty hotel only a few feet from where he was sitting.

There are too many unanswered questions remaining about what happened that night for Pemberton to have received a penalty as severe as the one given. The judge ruled that the financial demand of Laude’s mother was absurd, but the amount decided on is equally absurd. Pemberton couldn’t pay it in twenty years on a lance corporal’s salary, and he’ll never be able to come up with anything languishing in prison, which in the end ensures that Laude's family will probably never receive anything.

It’s a shame on the US Navy and Marine Corps that as fine of military organizations as they are (they are hands down the world’s best) that they take no better care of their young troops as to let something like this happen. Olongapo isn’t anything near what it was like twenty-five years ago before the US Navy moved out, but wickedness still abounds, and impressionable young men still throw away their honor, character and virtue looking for it.

When the Navy was based here the only advice ever given was be sure to use condoms, which were freely provided at medical facilities. At least at that time all the known “hospitality girls” (prostitution was illegal, therefore according to the Philippine government there were no prostitutes, but there were hospitality girls) had to work in Navy approved bars, and were checked monthly for AIDS. There isn’t even that anymore. There aren’t as many bars or working girls either, but there are transgenders who usually aren’t too hard to identify if you're familiar with the culture. But then you get a half drunk naive kid who knows nothing, who should have been warned, who should have been protected by his shipmates, and Scott Pemberton has thrown away the best years of his life.

Almost already forgotten in the whole sordid affair is Jeffrey Laude, a pathetic little twenty-six year old, living not just as a woman, but a prostitute, pushed into his vice and wicked lifestyle by his own mother, whose only concern in his death was that she be given 100 million pesos, 2.17 million dollars. No, the Philippine court ruled, only 4.6 million, 98,000 dollars. The value of a life. And nobody seems to care.