Bungled by hypocrisy

Backbencher

Bungled by hypocrisy

By Rod P. Kapunan

Hypocrisy has contributed much to bungle the impeachment case against Chief Justice Renato Corona. This is obvious. One could see how President Aquino has been carried away by emotions and misled by his sycophants into singling out Corona. They forget that in their charge against him on the case of Flight Attendants and Stewardess Association of PAL against Philippine Airlines, what happened was acollective act of the justices that concurred to give due course to the third motion for reconsideration that has become final, notwithstanding that it was filed more than twelve years ago.

Logic will tell that they can never grab the neck of Corona without doing the same to his accomplices who made a f*rt at our judicial system. Obviously, the prosecution crafted its complaint to single out Corona, while sanitizing his peers now playing possum in not knowing what happened. In fact, both the prosecution and the defense collaborated to canalize the questioning to avoid mentioning the name of the lawyer who wrote that third motion for reconsideration, notwithstanding that what Corona and his gang in that Division did was a clear violation of the basic canon on judicial ethics.

Had former Solicitor General Estelito Mendoza been an ordinary lawyer, it would have cost him his license. Corruption need not be proven in that case because the action to reverse their final order is beyond doubt indicative of corruption. This I hasten to say, for how many lawyers have been unjustly punished for being persistent or makulit?

Some suspect they purposely did not mention him fearing it might spill over to drag PAL owner Lucio Tan, a name familiar as one of the country’s leading political broker. Doing that could result in the magistrates doing some finger-pointing of who from among their fellow hypocrites colluded in reviving a case that have long decomposed to expose the maggots of immorality and corruption contaminating the system.

The same issue was raised against the defense when they went to the Supreme Court seeking for the issuance of a temporary restraining order to prevent the opening of Chief Justice Corona’s foreign currency deposit. As usual, grandstanding politicians led by Senator Franklin Drilon made their self-serving but discordant argument that the restraining order was violative of the Constitution. The argument of Senator Drilon was way off mark, but he has to play that pesky role as duty, and not to act as a cold and impartial judge in that reformatted “tabernacle for justice.”

To repeat, the contested issue is not about the elevation of the Senate impeachment court as above the Supreme Court, but on the basic issue that nobody is above the law. That reminded me of that unchaffed slogan by one politician which says: “The law applies to all, or none at all.” The issue raised by Drilon and his cabal unfortunately metamorphosed to nonsense when they began citing foreign jurisprudence in support of their wayward arguments.

Knowing Drilon as an ardent apologist of foreign interest groups in this country, he would be eclectic in insisting to examine Corona’s dollar bank account, while allowing foreign banks to keep secret their loot without him violating Corona’s right to invoke the equal protection clause. The hypocrites need to abrogate first that imperialist-dictated law. Even that, it would still not work against Corona because no law is supposed to retroact against one whose act was not yet punishable when he committed it.

From an incredible alibi made by Rep. Reynaldo Umali, who said the bank account record was just handed to him by somebody he did not know and could not identify, to the testimony of that self-righteous congressman by the name of Jorge Banal, who now concocts an even sillier fantasy claiming the documents were tossed inside their compound, the evidence the prosecution relies on most as crucial becomes dimmer than ever.

Even if we are to take it that the Supreme Court did not issue arestraining order to allow the hypocrites to make a travesty on somebody’s bank account, they should have known better, they as people used to pocketing much money, that a demand by a court to release the bank account records of a depositor accused of a crime involving fraud is always certified and duly signed by the manager or authorized bank officer attesting that said account was released upon specific orders of the court.

Without said certification, the issue cannot revolve on the genuineness or validity of the bank account, but on whether it can be presented as legal and valid evidence in court. The exclusionary rule these people are hankering are pure nonsense. The basic rule remains that illegally sourced evidence can never be presented or much more accepted in court. The wily strategy of Drilon to compare the spurious records at hand with the ones kept by the bank is his clever way of skirting the prohibition.

Otherwise, that court becomes a party to a crime. It is psychiatric and mental for somebody to say that the Senate impeachment court isabove the law because the theory why they are there is precisely for them to enforce that precept in government that nobody is above the law, or in Latin “nemo est supra legis.”

(rodkap@yahoo.com.ph)