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On Thursday, the court named retired chief justices Artemio Panganiban, Reynato Puno and Hilario G. Davide Jr., and retired associate justice Adolfo Azcuna as amici curiae, or friends of the court, to advise it on whether the 16-vote requirement should be changed in light of the nonparticipation of four senator-judges.
Over three days —the 17th, 18th and 19th days of the trial — the testimony from two ranking officials of the Office of the Vice President pointed to Duterte and her former security chief, Col. Raymund Dante Lachica, as the two people with the clearest knowledge of how the funds were handled and spent.
For two days, Aug. 11 and 12, Commission on Audit supervising auditor Xylene Mae del Campo returned to a deceptively simple point: Acknowledgment receipts may show that someone received money, but they do not, by themselves, establish why the money was paid, whether the expense was authorized or whether a claimed confidential operation actually succeeded.
Five weeks into the trial, the proceedings have become about more than the fate of one elected official. They have evolved into an examination of how the Philippine government accounts for billions of pesos in confidential funds and whether the existing safeguards are sufficient to protect public money from misuse.
The decisive questions lie in the financial documents that have only begun arriving at the Senate: whether the money was lawfully spent, whether Duterte's declared income matches her accumulated wealth, and whether prosecutors can prove their allegations beyond political rhetoric.
Leila De Lima: Ang confidentiality ay para protektahan ang lehitimong operasyon at informant. Hindi ito pahintulot para mag-imbento ng pangalan at dokumento. Hindi ito palusot para ibulsa ang pera.
The International Criminal Court has officially removed Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan from office after the court's governing body found him guilty of serious misconduct involving allegations of sexual abuse.
The two developments on Week 3 of the trial illustrate the sharply different evidentiary burdens facing the prosecution under the separate impeachment articles. One has secured access to potentially valuable financial records but still faces multiple legal and factual hurdles before those documents can establish unexplained wealth. The other rests largely on Duterte's own words, with prosecutors arguing that the constitutional offense is complete even if criminal liability remains under investigation.
National Bureau of Investigation Regional Director Jeremy Lotoc emerged as the prosecution's most consequential witness so far, not because he presented a proverbial smoking gun, but because he became the vehicle through which prosecutors sought to transform Duterte's controversial public statements into evidence of an impeachable offense.
Vice President Sara Duterte's lawyers on Wednesday claimed House prosecutors had weakened their own case under Article IV of the impeachment complaint after acknowledging that her controversial Nov. 23, 2024 statements did not prove she had actually hired an assassin to kill President Ferdinand Marcos Jr.
