IS PERSIDA ACOSTA AN EJK ENABLER?

Was Persida Acosta an EJK enabler? A closer look at her defense of police accounts, PAO’s role, disputed autopsies, and what the evidence supports.

8 min read

I posted something earlier thanking Atty. Persida Rueda-Acosta for her exemplary leadership at the Public Attorney's Office (PAO). Then one comment stopped me cold: "Hindi po ba ito enabler ng EJK (extrajudicial killing)?"

I took the post down because I realized the information in my head was incomplete. I had never examined her record that closely.

Like many people, I knew her mainly as the PAO chief, a lawyer who has held the position since 2001. That comment sent me digging, followed by several rounds of checking my own assumptions.

Nothing I found changed my mind about thanking her for how she has run PAO.

The office handled 787,124 cases and assisted almost 850,000 clients in 2021. In 2022, its caseload went past 850,000 while the number of clients exceeded 900,000.

PAO reported an 82.69 percent favorable disposition rate that year and later received a near-perfect performance score from the Department of Budget and Management. Those numbers affect families who rarely appear in the news.

The question I am examining here is narrower: What role, if any, did Acosta and her office play in the deaths connected to the drug war?

WHO SHE IS AND WHY THIS QUESTION COMES UP

Acosta has led PAO since 2001. The office provides free legal assistance to indigent Filipinos and also operates a forensic division.

That forensic work is one reason her name enters discussions about drug war deaths.

During the 2017 Senate investigation into the killing of 17-year-old Kian delos Santos, Acosta became emotional while defending the Philippine National Police (PNP) against accusations that officers were carrying out a policy of killing suspected drug users.

A year later, after the trial court convicted the officers, human rights lawyers pointed to the verdict as evidence that extrajudicial killings were taking place. Acosta rejected that characterization and maintained that Kian's killing was not an EJK.

The case continued through the courts. In December 2025, the Supreme Court affirmed the convictions of the three police officers and rejected their claim that Kian's death resulted from lawful police action.

That record is relevant because Acosta was a senior government official publicly defending the police position in one of the drug war's most prominent cases.

But the autopsy controversy that first made me reconsider my earlier praise raises a different issue.

WHERE MY INITIAL ASSUMPTION WAS WRONG

I initially connected the falsified-autopsy controversy to Acosta because PAO has its own forensic division.

Once I traced who actually performed the autopsies examined by forensic pathologist Dr. Raquel Fortun, the evidence pointed elsewhere.

Fortun examined 46 exhumed drug war victims. The original autopsies in that group were performed mostly by PNP doctors, with 23 cases attributed to them and three more handled by National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) doctors.

Ten bodies had never been autopsied.

Seven deaths had reportedly been recorded as resulting from natural causes even though Fortun found that 32 of the 46 bodies had gunshot wounds. Twenty-four had been shot in the head.

PAO's forensic division does not appear in the reporting on that batch of cases.

The problem also continued beyond those initial examinations.

Fortun has examined more than 90 exhumed bodies since July 2021 and has continued to report inconsistencies between physical findings and earlier death records.

A separate Rappler investigation found cases in which funeral parlors pressured grieving families to sign waivers allowing deaths to be recorded as resulting from natural causes without a doctor physically examining the body. The practice has been described as a "verbal autopsy."

The evidence surrounding those cases points more directly toward PNP and NBI doctors, along with funeral parlor practices, than toward PAO's forensic division.

That changes the accusation considerably.

PAO also operates under an enormous workload. With roughly 2,096 public attorneys handling close to a million cases in a year, each lawyer would be carrying hundreds of cases annually.

A heavily burdened office can make mistakes or fail people without those failures automatically proving deliberate participation in a larger abuse.

WHAT OTHER INSTITUTIONS SAID

After Fortun disclosed her findings, PNP spokesperson Col. Jean Fajardo said police were willing to investigate allegations of falsified autopsy reports if the relevant documents were forwarded to them.

She also said the PNP had already submitted requested records to the Department of Justice (DOJ), which was conducting its own fact-finding inquiry.

I could not locate a public record showing the final results of that DOJ inquiry.

Nor did I find a direct public response from Acosta or PAO addressing Fortun's findings by name.

That absence deserves to be recorded without turning it into evidence of guilt.

One question remains unanswered: How many drug-war-related autopsies outside Fortun's group were handled by PAO's forensic division, and were any of those findings later disputed?

I have not found enough public information to answer that.

NUMBERS I OVERSTATED

I also overstated the certainty surrounding the drug war death toll when I first looked at the available figures.

I had cited the Dahas Project's count of 5,997 deaths through mid-2019 as though one accepted figure existed. The available counts differ sharply because the groups compiling them use different definitions and cover different categories of deaths.

The Duterte government's #RealNumbersPH tally recorded 6,252 deaths during police anti-drug operations through May 2022.

Dahas uses a broader definition that includes killings outside formal police operations and therefore produces a higher count. The International Criminal Court's former prosecutor cited estimates ranging from 12,000 to 30,000 deaths.

There is no single number that can be presented without explaining who counted the deaths and what criteria were used.

I had also treated the drug war as something confined to the Duterte administration.

Dahas recorded 161 drug-related killings during the first five months of the succeeding administration, compared with 149 during Duterte's final six months in office.

The administration changed. Drug-related killings continued.

Whatever responsibility belongs to PAO, the police, other government institutions, or individuals involved in these cases, the underlying problem extended beyond Duterte's presidency.

WHERE THE ICC CASE STANDS

The International Criminal Court's Pre-Trial Chamber confirmed three counts of crimes against humanity against Rodrigo Duterte in April 2026 after a confirmation hearing held in February.

His trial is scheduled to open on November 30, 2026.

Human Rights Watch has pointed to the stark difference between the international proceedings and the limited number of successful prosecutions in the Philippines.

Nearly a decade after the drug war began, only a small number of cases have produced convictions involving individual police officers. Officials accused of designing or directing the wider policy have largely remained beyond the reach of domestic criminal accountability.

Nothing in the reporting or official documents I reviewed connects PAO or Acosta to the ICC case against Duterte.

The questions surrounding Acosta belong to another part of the drug war record: how government institutions and officials responded when killings were questioned, challenged, investigated, or defended.

WHAT I STILL CANNOT ANSWER

I have not found a documented breakdown showing how many drug-war-related autopsies were handled by PAO's forensic division compared with the PNP or NBI.

Without those figures, I cannot determine how large or small PAO's forensic role was across the entire drug war.

I also found no direct testimony from families identifying PAO's forensic unit as the source of a disputed autopsy finding, separate from the broader testimony of families describing problems with police reports, death certificates, funeral homes, and official investigations.

Those gaps remain open.

Filling them with assumptions would only replace one weak accusation with another.

SO, IS PERSIDA ACOSTA AN EJK ENABLER?

Based on the evidence I examined for this article, I do not think the record supports accusing Acosta or PAO of enabling the killings themselves.

I found no evidence tying her office to the disputed autopsies examined by Fortun. The available reporting on those cases points toward other institutions and practices.

Acosta's public conduct during the drug war, however, remains part of the record.

She defended police accounts in the Kian delos Santos case. She rejected the characterization of his killing as an EJK after police officers had already been convicted, and the Supreme Court later affirmed those convictions.

Critics therefore have a legitimate basis to ask whether her public interventions gave institutional and rhetorical cover to police accounts during a period when officers were being accused of unlawful killings.

That is as far as the evidence in this article takes me.

Her public defense of police accounts is documented. I found insufficient evidence to accuse her or PAO of participating in, facilitating, or enabling the killings themselves.

My original praise for her leadership of PAO stands, but it now comes with a qualification I did not have before I started digging.

Someone can lead an institution effectively and still deserve serious scrutiny for other choices made in public office. Acosta's record during the drug war deserves that scrutiny, especially when she used the authority of her position to defend police accounts in a case as grave as Kian delos Santos.

Calling her an EJK enabler goes further than the evidence in this article supports.

A narrower criticism has a firmer basis in the record: Acosta publicly defended police accounts surrounding an alleged extrajudicial killing, and that deserves to be examined as part of her record too.