Grace Poe/FACEBOOK PHOTO
A seasoned election lawyer said that the three Supreme Court justices who have previously voted to uphold the petition disqualifying presidential preference poll frontrunner Senator Grace Poe need not inhibit should the case be appealed before the high court.
Atty. Romulo Macalintal said that Senior Associate Justice Antonio Carpio and Associate Justices Arturo Brion and Teresita de Castro have no “compelling” reason to disqualify themselves from any case related to Poe as it is the long-standing position of the Supreme Court to reject such offer of inhibition.
Macalintal said that in the 1997 case of Libanan vs. House of Representatives Electoral Tribunal (HRET), the Supreme Court junked the offer of the justices to inhibit themselves from a petition filed before the high court which concerns a case they earlier decided at the HRET.
“The SC emphasized in the Libanan case, that since it has been its position to reject offer of inhibition of SC justices in the electoral tribunals when the cases they decided thereat are brought to the SC for review, ‘so it should be in all cases that may yet come before this Court’,” Macalintal said.
In the Libanan case, the SC cited a 1949 case where it said that being members of electoral tribunals did not deduct “a whit from them functions as members of the Supreme Court, and did not disqualify them in this litigation.”
The SC also said that there is no incompatibility when justices who were appointed to electoral tribunals will also sit in the SC.
Following the rejection of the motion of reconsideration filed by petitioner Rizalito David on the Senate Electoral Tribunal’ s decision favoring Grace Poe last week, Carpio said that he and the other two justices would inhibit when the case is brought to the high court.
“No, we have to inhibit because we cannot review our own decision,” Carpio said.
The SET junked with finality David’s petition against Poe, 5-4.
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