In the news item titled “Lawyers told: Be brave, do the right thing” (News, 3/26/17), Chief Justice Ma. Lourdes Sereno was quoted as saying: “In a world where ‘alternative facts’ and ‘hyperbole’ are fast blurring the lines between truth and lies, a lawyer who can help the courts, clients and the public sift the truth from lies performs a valuable service.”
We understand that the chief justice was referring to helter-skelter declarations emanating from Malacañang where information constantly battles with misinformation and disinformation—which shows when President Duterte says one thing and his mouthpieces say another, if not the exact opposite. That is something the Supreme Court cannot do anything about.
But there is something the high court can do inside its own backyard: Rectify a gross injustice done to my cousin, Christopher L. Soliva, who was sentenced to life imprisonment for crimes he did not commit.
I wrote about this way back more than a year ago (“High court swallowed clearly false evidence,” Opinion, 11/21/15). Soliva was in his early 20s attending college at the University of the Philippines Diliman, when he was committed to the New Bilibid Prison. Now in his 40s, he continues to languish, hoping against hope that the Supreme Court would take a closer look at the solitary “evidence” against him given by a single, flip-flopping witness who initially said he did not know who attacked him and his friends moments after the incident, and then saying, months later in court, that Soliva was one of those who attacked him.
No less than the Supreme Court itself had settled the matter decades ago that the utterance of a witness made immediately after the incident (when there was no opportunity to fabricate an account) is more trustworthy and reliable than his testimony to the contrary made in court (when the opportunity to lie is too obvious to ignore). At the very least, there is “reasonable doubt” as to the truthfulness of such a flip-flopping witness and that, to be sure, warrants a judgment of acquittal.
My cousin should have been back in the embrace of his family a long time ago. Instead, he is rotting in jail because the current Supreme Court chose to discard “well-settled jurisprudence” and applied “alternative jurisprudence”: The utterance made moments after an attack is unreliable because of the witness’ “agitated state of mind” as against his calm testimony in court months later?
With due respect—though I am only a college graduate and thus inadequately schooled in law—I cannot, for the life of me, accept that to be a standard of justice in this country.
MARGIE MEGAN LIBRANDO, m_m_libra@yahoo.com