When the Law Stops Halfway, So Does Public Trust

A state can ask its citizens to trust the law. It cannot order them to. That trust gets tested in quieter places than grand corruption trials: in a district prosecutor's office where a case file goes silent once powerful names appear, in a fishermen's compensation claim that has survived nine police progress notices without a single suspect named.

In Sampang, a district in East Java, courts have convicted four defendants, mostly mid-level officials and contractors, over the misuse of a 2020 pandemic-recovery road fund. The graft cost the state roughly Rp2.9 billion (about $180,000) out of a Rp12 billion allocation. Only Rp1.1 billion has been recovered so far, and where the rest went remains unexplained. Trial testimony, according to public reporting, named other officials, including one who signed off on project paperwork, as having played a role in the decisions that led to the loss. Prosecutors have not ruled out further suspects, though they note that expanding the case falls to police investigators rather than to them.

A second case, involving roughly $1.3 million meant to compensate fishermen for damage caused by an offshore gas operation, follows a similar arc. Police elevated it to a formal investigation in January after transfer records were submitted as evidence. Lawyers for the fishermen say investigators have identified a prospective suspect. Nine progress notices later, spanning nearly a year since the original complaint, no one has been named. Delay by itself proves nothing; thorough investigations take time. Unexplained delay, though, corrodes institutions in a way that transparent delay does not.

What links a road-paving scandal to a fisheries compensation dispute is less the money, which comes from entirely different sources, than the shape of the process. Both cases moved with reasonable speed against people executing decisions on the ground. Both slowed, or stalled outright, once the trail pointed toward people with more authority. To be clear, none of this establishes that any individual is guilty of anything beyond what a court has found, or that political interference has occurred. The presumption of innocence applies to everyone named in these proceedings. What deserves scrutiny is a pattern, not a person: an inconsistent enforcement record, swift here and stalled there, that breeds suspicion of a justice system working for some more than others. That suspicion does real institutional damage whether or not it holds up in any individual case.

When an investigation convicts field operators while leaving higher-level names unexamined, it tests what Ronald Dworkin called "law as integrity," the idea that coherent application, rather than convenience, gives law its moral authority. Selective enforcement corrodes more than one verdict's fairness; it undermines the predictability of the whole system. The fisheries case offers an even starker test of Tom Tyler's research on procedural justice, which found that compliance depends less on fear of punishment than on whether people believe a process is transparent, even-handed and respectful of individual dignity. Judged against Tyler's criteria, both East Java cases fall short mainly because of what remains unexplained. Richard Posner, writing from a law-and-economics tradition usually associated with efficiency rather than ethics, made a related point: unpredictable enforcement imposes real costs on fishermen who cannot plan around compensation that may or may not arrive, and on citizens who cannot judge the consequences of reporting wrongdoing in the first place.

None of this requires invoking conspiracy. Law never operates in a vacuum free of power, as Michel Foucault observed; institutional structures tend to advantage those with resources and connections, regardless of any individual's intent. The real question is whether a system has mechanisms robust enough to counteract the structural advantages that access, connections and standing inevitably confer. Saldi Isra, a leading Indonesian constitutional scholar, has made a related argument with particular force: the rule of law exists to constrain power, not to be administered by it. Every case that stalls at the threshold of political influence becomes, unavoidably, a public test of whether legal institutions can constrain power the way constitutional doctrine demands.

The deeper cost here is not fiscal. Indonesia stands to lose more from eroded institutional legitimacy than from the roughly Rp1.8 billion still unaccounted for in Sampang. Public trust works like load-bearing infrastructure for a democracy: it is what makes citizens willing to report wrongdoing, testify at personal risk, and accept unfavorable verdicts as legitimate. When that trust erodes, participation erodes with it. The dynamic often shows up not as outrage but as a quiet decline in complaints filed, a silence easily mistaken for improvement. For a country courting foreign investment and positioning itself as a rules-based economy, that erosion carries a cost measured in perceived legal risk as much as in domestic disillusionment.

Democracies cannot compel belief in their institutions. They can only earn it, case by case, through consistency applied regardless of rank. Every prosecution completed without fear or favor reinforces that belief. Every one left hanging erodes it, regardless of how small the sum involved. As the Sampang case proceeds to appeal and the fisheries investigation enters its second year without a named suspect, what is actually on trial is broader than either docket suggests: whether Indonesians can still reasonably believe the law applies to everyone the same way. That question admits no verdict, no appeal and no closure, unlike the cases themselves. There is only the daily, unglamorous test of whether the next case is handled the way the last one was. That test never adjourns. It gets administered every day, in the quiet calculations of ordinary citizens deciding whether the law is still worth believing in.