Editorial cartoon by VINCENT GO
THE prosecution panel in the impeachment case against Supreme Court Chief Justice Renato Corona seems to have scored points in the court of public opinion, but is failing to impress the impeachment court which will decide Corona’s fate.
Week 5 was a case in point. Prosecution lawyers called Philippine Airlines vice president Enrique Javier as a witness for Article 3, which accuses Corona of lacking the competence, integrity, probity and independence to sit in the High Tribunal.
Javier was to testify, prosecution lawyers said, that Corona and his wife Cristina were recidivist PAL freeloaders—repeatedly availing themselves of free first class tickets—despite PAL being a respondent in a case filed by the Flight Attendants’ and Stewards’ Association of the Philippines (FASAP) before the High Tribunal.
Senate President Juan Ponce Enrile, presiding officer of the impeachment court, would not hear of it, rejected Javier and told the prosecutors off. They were accusing Corona of bribery, he said, but nowhere in the impeachment complaint does bribery appear. Only if the articles of impeachment were amended would Enrile allow such evidence, and Enrile made it clear he thought prosecutors acted like they were trying to put one over the impeachment court.
And then came Justice Secretary Leila de Lima, an Article 7 witness, who was to testify that Corona favored his former boss, ex-president Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, when the Supreme Court issued a Temporary Restraining Order that would have nullified the order for Arroyo’s arrest.
But the TRO was issued by the court as a collegial body, the decision was not Corona’s alone to make, and De Lima had no proof of a Corona conspiracy to protect Arroyo. Enrile considered De Lima’s testimony hearsay although he allowed it to stay on the record.
And so this is where things stand as the impeachment trial lumbers toward Week 6. Sure, the revelations about Corona so far may have shocked and angered the public—the apparent lack of delicadeza, the unexplained assets, the conflicts of interest. But the revelations need to withstand the rigors of the court with all its technicalities, and not merely the canons of a journalistic report.
And somehow, it’s hard to shake the feeling the prosecution has been presenting its case on a hit-or-miss or trial-and-error basis, if not as a fishing expedition from which they have as yet no idea what they might reel in. – Luz Rimban
