“for an opinion as to whether there is not some provision in the present Penal Code which will provide adequate punishment for such offences as are related herein.”
The opinion of the Attorney-General rendered in response to this request[11] encouraged me to believe that something could be done under existing law.
I returned the papers, together with the opinion, to the governor of Nueva Vizcaya and three test suits were brought as promptly as possible.
One of them has become historic. It was brought against Tomás Cabanag, a well-known slave dealer who made a business of buying and selling Ifugao children. He was charged with illegal detention in connection with the admitted sale, by him, of an Ifugao girl named Gamaya.[12]
He was convicted in the Court of First Instance. I quote the following extract from the decision of the court:
“The Congress of the United States has declared that human slavery shall not exist in these islands and while no law, so far as I can discover, has yet been passed either defining slavery in these islands or affixing a punishment for those who engage in this inhuman practice as dealers, buyers, sellers, or derivers, the facts established in this case show conclusively that the child Jimaya was by the defendant forcibly and by fraud, deceit and threats unlawfully deprived of her liberty and that his object and purpose was an unlawful and illegal one, to wit, the sale of the child for money into human slavery. This constitutes the crime of Detencion ilegal defined and penalized by Article 481 of the Penal Code and this Court finds the defendant guilty as charged in the information.”
The case was promptly appealed to the Supreme Court and was there lost on March 16, 1907.
Gamaya, a thirteen-year-old Ifugao girl, had been purchased from her mother for pigs, hens, rice and a cloak, under the absurd pretext that the object of the purchase was to keep her at home, where she would, of course, naturally have remained in any event. She was allowed to stay with her mother during a period of some three years. In this manner the purchaser was saved the cost of boarding her while she was growing up. Having now reached what the Igorots consider a marriageable age, she was sold to a man who was engaged in the business of buying in Nueva Vizcaya children to sell in the lowlands of Isabela; in other words, to a slave dealer. He sold her to an inhabitant of the town of Caoayan, in Isabela, who had instructed him to buy a girl. Caoayan is distant many days of hard overland travel from this girl’s home. When taken there she was among an alien people of another tribe and another religion, and although, as stated by the Supreme Court, she was not kept under lock and key and although that court held that:—
“... There can be no unlawful detention under article 481 of the Penal Code without confinement or restraint of person, such as did not exist in the present case.”
and held further that:—