I THOUGHT that Maria Lourdes Sereno had only purchased, using funds of the Supreme Court, a bullet-proof Toyota SUV during her abbreviated term as pretender to the position of chief justice. I only learned recently that the SUV was bought together with three “big bikes,” the oversize motorcycles favored by the powerful to clear a path for them on Metro Manila’s clogged-up streets.
And the only reason I learned about the bikes is because new Chief Justice Teresita Leonardo de Castro said she would be using neither the SUV nor the motorcycles that the infamous Sereno was forced to return after she was expelled from the court. De Castro, the legitimate successor to the late Chief Justice Renato Corona, would in all likelihood continue to use her nondescript Toyota van, which she rode in to her swearing-in ceremony yesterday as befits someone who doesn’t claim to be constantly conducting a two-way conversation with God.
Yes, it appears that propriety, seniority and even sanity have been restored to the high court with de Castro’s assumption to Corona’s post. And the end of Sereno’s tenure as faux chief justice also marks the final vindication for Corona, who was forced to step down by a vengeful president who used government funds to buy a Congress that was only too willing to remove the head of a co-equal branch — for fat fees, of course.
At this late date, I still do not know if President Rodrigo Duterte actively worked to remove Sereno. All I know is, her own colleagues in the high court rebelled against Sereno’s misbegotten and misguided rule, deciding in the end to throw her out through an unprecedented but totally legal and unassailable quo warranto proceeding.
And now that De Castro, who will be chief justice only for less than two months, has ended Sereno’s bogus reign, Duterte is being accused of “rewarding” de Castro for voting with eight other justices to remove Sereno. I suppose the opposition, which fought hard to retain Sereno and which is now engaged in the pathetic move to impeach the eight justices who removed their God-conversing idol, is correct — but for entirely different reasons.
De Castro was surely rewarded with the chief justiceship because she is the most senior magistrate among the three whose names were submitted to the President. She was also certainly rewarded for being an accomplished jurist, having gone through the judicial mill starting as a law clerk in the Supreme Court in 1973 after passing the bar in 1972 with a grade of 80 percent.
De Castro was also rewarded for steadily climbing the ladder of accomplishment, working her way from being state counsel of the Department of Justice (1978), leaving the department only in 1995 as head of its legal staff. And Duterte must also have rewarded de Castro for getting appointed to the Sandiganbayan anti-graft court, eventually becoming presiding justice and chairman of that tribunal’s first division until she was appointed in 2007 to the Supreme Court by then President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo.
Of course, Duterte must also have rewarded de Castro for her work in convicting former President Joseph Estrada of plunder when he was still very popular, so popular that Arroyo later pardoned Estrada. And Duterte must also have noted, in his reward-giving, that de Castro once served as president of the International Association of Women Judges (2012-2014) and as chairman of the bar examination committee in 2015.
In other words, Duterte rewarded de Castro for her seniority and achievements, not because she was a college classmate, as Sereno (the most junior and most unaccomplished magistrate at the time) was to the president who appointed her, Noynoy Aquino. And de Castro has also been known to refer to the Almighty in public for the rewards she has received, even if, unlike Sereno, there is no record that God ever talked back to de Castro.
As de Castro said upon her appointment to the high court in2007: “Everything happens in God’s time. I believe that my 34 years of service in the judiciary and a good track record make me qualified for this position.”
And so, yes, de Castro was rewarded for her hard work and performance. Now she has until her mandatory retirement in October to enjoy her just reward.
Even if a top-of-the-line bulletproof SUV and three motorcycle outriders aren’t part of the reward package for the new chief justice.
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But as I’ve said, the assumption of de Castro to the chief justiceship is also a vindication for the injustice committed by Aquino and his Congress lapdogs against Corona. And it is fitting that Sereno was not removed from office by Congress through impeachment, by many of the same lawmakers who condemned Corona only because Aquino larded them with Disbursement Acceleration Program funds.
It is also proper that Corona is officially being replaced by de Castro, who is only exactly one week older than Corona. Corona would have retired upon turning 70 on October 15; it’s as if some karmic law was at work to make the justice closest in seniority to Corona take over his position, even if only for 41 days.
Of course, Corona is now dead, having succumbed to a heart attack right before the 2016 elections that put Duterte in Malacañang. He never saw the justice who usurped the position in 2012 removed six years later — but I’m sure he would have approved of it.
Corona would have certainly appreciated the fact that, because Sereno’s appointment has been deemed void from the beginning in the quo warranto case, de Castro succeeded him in a straight line. The details will have to be worked out, but I am sure that at some future time, the Supreme Court will eventually continue to call Corona the country’s 23rd chief justice and de Castro the 24th, when it has figured out what to do with the six-year judicial black hole during which Sereno reigned.
As for everyone else in Malacañang, Congress, the media and elsewhere to have passed their unfavorable judgment on Corona simply because Noynoy said so, they, too, will have their day of reckoning. The removal of Sereno forms only the first part of granting justice to Renato Corona.
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