A whiff of danger

“Weep like a woman for what you could not defend as a man!” the mother told Boabdil as the Muslim caliph wept over the besieged city of  Granada, before fleeing to North Africa in 1483. “Llora como mujer lo que no has sabido defender como hombre.”

Christian armies earlier reconquered Toledo, Sevilla and Cordoba. In the Iberian Peninsula, the caliphate shriveled into a perimeter around Granada, then collapsed.

“Walang iiyak! Walang iiyak!” (No crying! No crying!) demonstrators chanted. Most protestors were from the Iglesia ni Cristo, the Inquirer reported. They lofted identically printed placards. “Salamat,” the tear-choked Corona responded.

Rewind to March 2011. The House justice committee chair flayed INC officials for covertly badgering to gut House Resolution 1089. That’d give Ombudsman Merceditas Gutierrez an escape hatch, claimed Rep. Niel Tupas Jr. Rather than run the impeachment gauntlet, Gutierrez resigned.

In mid-December, Corona vowed from the Supreme Court’s lobby steps he’d meet impeachment head-on. Wife Cristina and children beamed at his side. “CJ, CJ, CJ,” chanted black ribbon-festooned court employees, who shut down Manila courts for the day. Reporters tallied 56 bursts of applause.

President Aquino would install “a puppet” in his place. Impeachment was an attack on the Judiciary, Corona charged. He mocked Mr. Aquino’s stance as “baluktot na daang matuwid” (crooked righteous path). He wouldn’t buckle, as Ombudsman Gutierrez did.

Two weeks into the bruising trial, Corona asked the Supreme Court: Issue a temporary restraining order to stop the impeachment. The proceedings were “null and void” from the start. He’d been denied due process. The articles of impeachment were transmitted without notice or preliminary hearing. The court abused its discretion by issuing subpoenas for the Chief Justice’s bank accounts.

“This is not an act of desperation…or disrespect,” the defense panel asserted. “The defense is like a mouse pushed into a corner.” No recourse is left but to bring the issue outside of the impeachment body. Slamming the brakes on the impeachment enables Corona to protect his constitutional rights.

“That’d be acquittal by TRO,” snapped Rep. Sonny Angara. “The Corona petition is almost the white flag—almost,” UP College of Law’s Theodore Te noted. “The due process clause covers life, liberty and property, not public office. Is it ethical for a sitting Chief Justice to ask for relief from the very Court he leads and from which he has not taken leave?”

Corona has many admirable talents. But is the honed ethical sense, which Filipinos call delicadeza, one of this? Doubts surged since his acceptance of a midnight appointment from then President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo. Gloria—who? The 14th president of the Philippines. Remember?

A half month of acrimonious hearings meanwhile pried open a Pandora’s box. Contents caromed from glitzy condos, like Bellagio and the Columns to gap-studded statements of assets, liabilities and net worth for seven years. Over P31.7 million, stashed in PSBank and BPI accounts, were partially reported in his SALNs.

By a vote of 8-5, the high court stopped Thursday the Senate impeachment court from compelling PSBank to disclose Corona’s dollar accounts. The prosecution claims Corona stashed with PSBank’s Katipunan branch over  $700,000. That remains a claim.

“It is not a crime to have a dollar account,” the defense bristled. Of course not, replied Sen. Serge Osmeña, chair of the Senate committee on banks. The question for the impeachment court, however, is where the dollars, if any, came from. So far, the prosecution’s documents on the dollar accounts of Corona seem “admissible evidence,” Sen. Francis Escudero claims.

Open your dollar accounts voluntarily to the public, suggested President Aquino. “We are public servants,” Mr. Aqunio said in Taguig City. “Public trust is part of it…Open the accounts to show you’re not hiding anything.”

“One of the exceptions in the Bank Secrecy [law] is in cases of impeachment,” Inquirer’s Raul Pangalangan pointed out. “[N]ondisclosure of information… is still the general rule. The subpoenas are exclusively for the impeachment proceedings. To use a metaphor from the Erap impeachment, the second envelope must be opened.”

In the Corona impeachment, no dollar accounts will be opened anytime soon. The defense, in fact, upped the ante.

Malacañang dangled P100 million for every senator-judge who’d buck the TRO, the defense claimed. It refused to reveal its sources. “It’s up to the informant to decide whether to come out.”

The impeachment trial “deteriorated into an inquisition,” Corona charged in an Ateneo Law School address over the weekend. “Some senator-judges have taken on the role of prosecutors.” There is a “well-funded media campaign to besmirch” his name.

Is the defense laying the groundwork for a walkout of the defense from the trial? wondered Deputy Speaker Lorenzo “Erin” Tañada. A walkout by prosecutors on Jan. 16, 2001, sealed the second envelope in the Estrada impeachment trial. Can a walkout by defense lawyers weld shut Corona’s dollar deposits for good?

And how  do the impeachment court and Supreme Court inch back from the brink? The scent of danger hangs heavy in the air.

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