Time to ‘pulverize sword of Damocles’

There’s a festering issue in the Supreme Court, which is in a state of unprecedented flux. It has to address the matter now or ever be under threat, according to Inquirer columnist and former chief justice Artemio V. Panganiban, whose imagery in his column of April 18 is provocative and searingly apt: “Now is the time for the Court to pulverize the self-inflicted sword of Damocles it dangled over the heads of its members: a sword that the Solicitor General [Jose Calida], the lawyer of the Executive Branch, can wield anytime they ‘misbehaved’…”

The sword is the ouster of any member of the high court via quo warranto when the Constitution dictates that justices may be removed from office only by impeachment. The sword was effectively wielded in May 2018, when the tribunal voted 8-6 to grant the quo warranto petition to remove then Chief Justice Maria Lourdes Sereno, on grounds that she failed to submit the requisite statements of assets, liabilities and net worth (SALNs) when she was a professor at the University of the Philippines College of Law. She was to retire in 2030 yet.

Last year, in a similar petition involving Associate Justice Marvic Leonen, an attempt was made to use the same strategy that did Sereno in. But the justices circled the wagons and unanimously voted to reject the request for copies of Leonen’s SALNs, nipping the quo warranto route in the bud and preventing a possible reprise of what critics called then “a black day for justice and the rule of law.”

And yes, it was those who “misbehaved” who were targeted. Sereno angered President Duterte early on in his administration when she publicly took umbrage at his naming certain judges suspected of involvement in the trade in illegal drugs. Leonen was perceived by supporters of defeated vice presidential candidate Ferdinand Marcos Jr., an ally of the President, as dragging his feet on deciding on the election complaint of the dictator’s son against Vice President Leni Robredo.

It’s “a horrible sword that villains — by simply asking the SolGen to unsheathe it — can terrify [the justices] and embarrass them publicly with, or at least, clog further the Court’s already congested dockets,” Panganiban wrote. He said that with the tribunal’s “new composition” — seven of the eight justices who voted to oust Sereno having retired  — the time to act is now.

But there’s another important issue resulting from Sereno’s removal from office through a process other than impeachment. The question of granting retirement benefits to the former chief justice is acquiring urgent proportions in light of such a privilege having been accorded her predecessor, Renato Corona, who was impeached and convicted in a Senate trial and subsequently removed from office.

Corona was named chief justice by then President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo in May 2010, impeached by the House of Representatives in December 2011, and found guilty in May 2012 of failure to fully disclose his bank assets in his SALNs. He died of cardiac arrest in April 2016.

Early this year, the Supreme Court granted the petition of Corona’s widow seeking his retirement benefits and other allowances “equivalent to a five-year lump sum of the salary and allowances he was receiving at the time of his removal” — as though his impeachment trial and conviction were all for naught. Ordinary Filipinos rendered jobless by the COVID-19 pandemic and thereafter forced to beg or borrow the wherewithal to live may understandably be aggrieved. Why accord such a privilege to the heirs of one found to have, in violation of the law, concealed as much as $2.4 million and P80.7 million in bank deposits (or what may reasonably be deemed ill-gotten wealth)? One, moreover, who ascended to his high post through a “midnight appointment” — a president may not make any appointments two months before an election and until his/her term ends on June 30 — and who betrayed public trust “through his track record marked by partiality and subservience in cases involving the Arroyo administration”?

To be sure, Sereno has not expressed interest in her retirement benefits as chief justice, or even in her reinstatement as associate justice, which, as letter writer Yvette San Luis-Petrocelli correctly pointed out last March 31, “was never questioned and stands to this day.”

Chief Justice Alexander Gesmundo took his oath of office on April 5. He is confronted with the opportunity to bring about a high court that is, in Panganiban’s words, “worthy of public trust and a judiciary invigorated by speed, integrity, wisdom, and independence.”