Senate President Juan Ponce Enrile. INQUIRER FILE PHOTO
The Senate sitting as an impeachment court is now the scene of the battle to gain the upper hand in the court of public opinion over the impeachment of Chief Justice Renato Corona.
Lawyer Romulo Macalintal, who witnessed the Tuesday hearing that was adjourned early because of the prosecution’s lack of witnesses, enunciated in an interview what many in the gallery had observed.
Macalintal said the defense “made a very strong point” in that it “exposed the fact” that the prosecution “does not have the evidence yet aside from [the computer-generated certified true copies of deeds of sale issued by] the Land Registration Authority (LRA).”
Smoking gun
He pointed out that there seemed to be no proper coordination among the prosecutors themselves on the order of presentation of evidence.
The search for what senator-judges described as a “smoking gun” to convict Corona on any of the eight articles of impeachment lodged by the House of Representatives is behind the prosecution’s decision on Tuesday, the second day of the trial, to rearrange the presentation of evidence on the eight articles of impeachment.
Cavite Representative Elpidio Barzaga Jr. manifested to the impeachment court the prosecution’s change of tactic to present evidence on Article 2 ahead of Article 1.
The second article deals with Corona’s alleged failure to file his statements of assets, liabilities and net worth (SALNs). The prosecution had earlier linked the Chief Justice and his family to properties with a combined worth of P200 million, and used the word “ill-gotten” to describe these properties.
The first article refers to Corona’s alleged bias for former President and now Pampanga Representative Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, who appointed him to the helm of the Supreme Court in May 2010 despite an election ban on such appointments.
Barzaga said the issue of Corona’s purported properties had been in the news for some time and had caught the people’s attention. Thus, he said, there was a need to present evidence posthaste in order to establish whether these properties actually belonged to the Chief Justice and members of his family, as alleged by the prosecution.
He argued that despite claims in the media on the supposed “ill-gotten wealth” of Corona, “not a single [piece of] evidence has been presented to the impeachment court.”
Lesson in humility
But Barzaga subsequently admitted that the prosecution had no witnesses on that day to authenticate the documents from the LRA that were to be presented, prompting the presiding officer, Senate President Juan Ponce Enrile, to postpone the proceedings for the next day.
In a press statement, Zambales Representative Milagros Magsaysay said the turn of events at the impeachment trial on Tuesday should be a “lesson” to the prosecution to be “more prepared and more humble” in its words and deeds.
“I hope they act and speak more humbly when they make statements to the public because most people, based on blogs and Twitter messages, believe that the defense team is more humble. They should remember that when they go to the Senate they represent not only themselves but the House of Representatives as an institution,” Magsaysay said.
She said the prosecution’s admission of unpreparedness on Day 2 of the trial, after weeks of declaring in public that they had a strong case and had prepared extensively for it, was “embarrassing” for the entire House.
Quezon Representative Danilo Suarez said he sympathized with the prosecution.
Embarrassed in public
“Although I don’t agree with their approach, it also hurts me when the prosecution team members are criticized. They are our fellow congressmen and we also feel their pain if they get embarrassed in public,” he said.
Suarez said the fact that the prosecution team came unprepared showed that the minority was right in criticizing the impeachment process as railroaded by majority leaders.
“It was finished in less than five hours, from the filing of the complaint to the signing. That’s the kind of case you will get for doing a rush job,” he said.
But Magsaysay said the public should be more forgiving of the prosecutors because they were still “learning on the job.”
Palace optimistic
Secretary Edwin Lacierda, President Benigno Aquino III’s spokesperson, attributed the prosecution’s failure to present evidence on Tuesday to “opening day jitters.”
He said the administration remained optimistic that the impeachment process would go its way.
“[It’s] still a long battle… We are confident that the prosecutors will do well today (Wednesday). They have witnesses already available,” Lacierda said.
With the trial being simultaneously fought in the court of public opinion, Corona’s defense panel has designated three top-notch lawyers as spokespersons.
Relatively young and articulate, Tranquil Salvador III and Karen Jimeno are on hand on a daily basis to rebut every statement of their counterparts in the prosecution—Aurora Representative Juan Edgardo Angara, Marikina Representative Miro Quimbo and Quezon Representative Erin Tañada.
Jimeno and Angara, both graduates of the University of the Philippines College of Law, obtained their master’s degree in law from Harvard Law School.
The two camps hold press conferences at the Padilla Room adjacent to the Senate chamber. With reports from Gil C. Cabacungan Jr. and Norman Bordadora