IN JUSTIFYING the proposal that President Macapagal-Arroyo appoint the successor to Chief Justice Reynato Puno long before he retires on May 17, 2010, Quezon City Rep. Matias Defensor, the House representative in the Judicial and Bar Council (JBC), said that never in the history of the Supreme Court was there a time when there was no chief justice.

This is false. When Chief Justice Marcelo Fernan resigned to run for president, Senior Associate Justice Andres Narvasa served as acting chief justice until the JBC sent a list of nominees and President Corazon Aquino appointed Narvasa to the position. There was also a gap when Chief Justice Fred Ruiz Castro died in office.

Former Sen. Franklin Drilon is right: The JBC should be reorganized to remove the politicians and free it from the influence of politicians. The secretary of justice and the chairmen of the Senate and House committees on justice are members of the JBC. Politicians will always try to put their allies in the judiciary for obvious reasons.

In the first place, the JBC was created to free from politics the appointment of members of the judiciary and assure its independence. Making politicians members of that august body defeats its purpose.

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Another reform in the appointment of justices to the Supreme Court should bar politicians, past and present. We have seen that under the Arroyo administration, more former politicians were appointed to the Court than career judges. This is bad.

Politicians carry a lot of political baggage everywhere they go, including the Supreme Court. No matter how honest a justice is, he is only human and cannot avoid pressure and ?pakiusap? when deciding cases. Gratitude or ?utang na loob? is a virtue ingrained in the Filipino?s moral upbringing. So no matter how they deny it, ?utang na loob? will sometimes influence a justice?s decision and therefore deny justice to the other party. With no ex-politicians in the Court, there would be no ?utang na loob? and other considerations influencing decisions. (Let me note that former politicians have been appointed as chief justices, e.g., Marcelo Fernan, who then resigned to run for president of the Philippines but lost, and Hilario Davide, a small-time Cebu politician.)

The high court should be reserved for career judges who rose through the ranks of the lower courts or the prosecution arm of the government, and private practitioners who have distinguished themselves in the profession. The honor and prestige attached to the Court should be their reward for working hard and keeping themselves clean while rising through the ranks.

In the past few administrations, however, congressmen and other politicians were appointed by the president as secretary of justice, solicitor general, and presidential legal adviser and, from there, elevated to the Supreme Court. This is bad for the morale of the appellate court justices and lower court judges who wait in the wings for years, only to be sideswiped by an upstart politician who happens to be the apple of the eye of the president. Why would a judge or justice in the lower courts do everything to keep his nose clean expecting to be appointed to the high court as the culmination of his career, when he could be bypassed by a politician?

One more thing: There should be a law prohibiting retired justices from acting as lawyers for litigants in the lower courts. Justices, retired or not, are viewed with so much awe and respect by judges and lawyers that they exercise undue influence on the courts. The image of Lady Justice blindfolded and holding a scale is not true at all. Judges and justices can see and they can succumb to the frailties of human nature. I know of a land case decided with finality by the Supreme Court that was reopened when a retired justice, acting as lawyer for one of the litigants, wrote a letter to the chief justice. Not only was the case reopened, the decision was reversed!

Besides, the retired justices do not need the extra income. They get a very handsome retirement pay.

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Why is live coverage by the media of the Ampatuan trial being prohibited? Isn?t that a denial of the public?s right to information? I understand that the judge wants to avoid the circus atmosphere that sometimes descends on an event when competing television networks jockey for vantage points. But that can easily be avoided by assigning one or two pool cameras and limiting them to a small part of the courtroom and then sharing the footage with the other networks. The same goes for print reporters. For the public, closed-circuit cameras can broadcast the trial to TV sets outside.

The alternative is to deny the people the right to view a very important trial. What is being tried here is not a sex crime or a family quarrel where intimate details are dredged up by the lawyers. It is a heinous crime. The accused will not be denied their right to a fair trial. The people have the right to be informed how justice is done, so that they will learn, once more, that crime does not pay.

If the trial is closed to live coverage, people will start suspecting that some hanky-panky is going on, especially because the Ampatuan family is a close ally of the President. So whatever the decision will be, people will suspect that some horsetrading went on.

This is not the first time that a sensational case like this has been tried here and elsewhere. Most of them were handled well. There is no need to stop now.