State lawyers oppose Corona plea

Former Chief Justice Renato Corona. FILE PHOTO/SENATE POOL

MANILA, Philippines—State prosecutors have opposed former Chief Justice Renato Corona’s motion for a judicial determination of probable cause in the eight perjury charges filed against him by the government, describing the relief being sought as “misplaced and improper.”

In a 14-page comment, prosecutors from the Office of the Ombudsman (OMB) asked the Sandiganbayan antigraft court’s Third Division to ignore Corona’s plea and proceed with the trial proper.

The prosecution said Corona, as a former chief justice of the Supreme Court, knew that a determination of probable cause at this stage was confined only to justification for the issuance of an arrest warrant against him.

This, the prosecution said, was different from the probable cause that is the standard of proof to justify the filing of an information in court.

There are two ways of determining probable cause: executive and judicial.

In the perjury cases against him, the OMB found probable cause to indict Corona, who asked the court to review the public prosecutor’s finding of probable cause in the hope the information would be quashed.

“The question of whether a respondent in a preliminary investigation should be indicted in court is one exclusively lodged in the public prosecutor; absent grave abuse of discretion, the courts will not interfere in the exercise of the public prosecutor’s discretion,” the OMB lawyers said.

They said that if the accused wanted to assail the finding of probable cause by the public prosecutor, jurisprudence had time and again held that the proper remedy was to file an action for certiorari in the Supreme Court.

A certiorari is a writ for the superior court to call up the records of an inferior court or a body acting in quasijudicial capacity.

The prosecution stressed that what was being assailed by the accused was not an error of judgment by the public prosecutor in determining probable cause, but an error of jurisdiction arising from the grave abuse of discretion that tainted such determination.

It said Corona’s arguments pertained only to evidentiary matters and alleged errors in the appreciation of facts.

“In no way was he able to show that it is either patent from the record, uncontroverted or established that no crime exists in this case,” the prosecutors said.—Cynthia D. Balana