SC won’t stop HRET from acting on protest vs Lucy Torres

Leyte Representative Lucy Marie Torres Gomez failed to win the Supreme Court’s support in her bid to stop the election protest against her 2010 victory.

In a 13-page ruling, the high court sitting en banc allowed the House of Representatives Electoral Tribunal (HRET) to proceed with the deliberations over the protest filed by Torres’ rival, Lakas-Kampi-CMD candidate Eufrocino Codilla Jr. The ruling, dated March 20, was penned by Associate Justice Maria Lourdes Sereno, and distributed here only yesterday.

The Supreme Court justices are holding their summer sessions here.

Gomez assumed the candidacy of her husband, actor Richard Gomez, who was poised to run as a Liberal Party candidate for Leyte’s fourth congressional district until he was disqualified on February 17, 2010, by the Commission on Elections (Comelec).

The high court said the Comelec en banc allowed the substitution and Gomez emerged as the winner with 101,250 votes over Codilla’s 76,549 votes, or a margin of 24,701.

On May 21, 2010, the HRET decided to hear the protest filed by Codilla after he failed to persuade the Comelec to suspend her proclamation on May 12 that year.

Gomez asked the Supreme Court to stop the HRET from ruling on the complaint. She said the poll tribunal “acted with grave abuse of discretion amounting to a lack or excess of jurisdiction when it refused to dismiss the election protest despite an admittedly defective verification.”

Among the perceived defects of the poll protest, the court said, was an erroneous entry signifying the date when the complaint was notarized, which it ruled “was not fatal to the jurisdiction of the HRET.”

Gomez said the HRET should have treated the complaint “as an unsigned pleading and must be dismissed,” due to the errors.

But the court said one of the defects was a mechanical error that “need not be overly magnified as to constitute a defect in the verification [document],” and that “there is a presumption that official duty has been regularly performed” on the notarization process.

Gomez also accused the HRET of grave abuse of discretion for allowing Codilla to question her qualifications as a candidate, the court said. The disqualification of her husband “rendered [him] a noncandidate, who therefore could not have been validly substituted, as there was no candidacy to speak of,” the ruling said.

The high court said the HRET is the sole judge of all contests relating to the elections, returns and qualifications of members of the House of Representatives, and has the power to determine whether the facts will justify a complaint.