Mob rule

One, so far the prosecution’s best witnesses have been two secretaries, both women. They are Kim Henares and Leila de Lima. They are the surest signs P-Noy is serious about prosecuting his anticorruption campaign.

De Lima did a particularly outstanding job last week in light of what she was up against. It’s not the easiest thing proving a chief justice is biased toward someone he is beholden to. Easier proving he is corrupt. To prove bias, you need to show two things: pattern and ascendancy.

You take Renato Corona’s decisions singly, and however wrongheaded they are, they can always be excused as oversight or lapse in judgment. It’s like someone who always gets into trouble with his bosses. He can always argue in each case that it’s his boss’ fault. But you take the cases collectively and you see the problem is not with his bosses, it’s with him. It’s the pattern that reveals, not the individual cases.

Just as well, you take Corona’s decisions singly or collectively, and however wrongheaded they are, they can still be excused as the product of a collective delusion. He did not make the mistake alone, most of his fellows did.

Despite this, De Lima managed to do very well. She managed to at least posit, if not prove, that in the case alone of the Supreme Court’s ruling to allow Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo to leave the country, Corona exercised ascendancy over his fellows and did everything in his power or out of it, including bend the rules to misshapen form, to enforce his will. Prosecution still needs to show pattern and continuing ascendancy, but it’s a good start.

Two, arguably De Lima rested her case on the word, or account, of two dissenting justices, who are Ma. Lourdes Sereno and Antonio Carpio. Which had Serafin Cuevas crying hearsay and Miriam Santiago crying foul, the latter specifically saying that if you must cite from the record, cite the majority opinion and not the minority one.

Juan Ponce Enrile, I thought, gave a nicely nuanced ruling when he ruled that some parts of De Lima’s testimony could not be accepted, particularly the ones that have to do with Corona’s behavior, because she did not personally witness how he went about doing what he did, but some parts of it could because she was citing from a document on record. You can always question the accuracy of what a public document says, but you cannot question that it says those things. Citing from it is no more hearsay than citing from the Constitution. You can always disagree with the Constitution, but you cannot disagree that it says what it does.

Particularly noteworthy is Carpio’s claim that he and Presbitero Velasco agreed that Arroyo had not complied with one of the conditions of the TRO but Corona’s version, which the Court adopted, was that Arroyo had “substantially complied” with them. That only points to the importance of either Carpio or Sereno, or both, providing the testimony themselves. Nothing like getting it straight from the horse’s mouth. That of course will require Carpio and/or Sereno summoning reserves of courage to take on their fellows in the Court. And Carpio’s appearance in particular will be used by Corona’s camp to sow intrigue, or fears, that Carpio is after his job. But it’s their word and not anybody else’s that will clinch that deal.

As to Santiago’s point, why must we naturally scorn the minority decision in favor of the majority one? Where the Court itself is under indictment, where the justices themselves are suspected of acting like a Mafia, the minority decision is the best thing to look at. That was how the Supreme Court was during Marcos’ time, which was how Claudio Teehankee rose to prominence. That was how the Supreme Court was during Arroyo’s time, and that is how the Supreme Court is under Corona. In conditions of utter benightedness, voices in the wilderness are the harbinger of wisdom. In conditions of conscripted silence, dissenting voices are the roar of truth.

Three, in conditions of conspiracy, collegiality is just a fancy word for mob rule.

Why should collegiality protect Corona? Why should the fact that the other justices who—like him are Arroyo’s protégés, but who unlike him were not midnight appointees—voted like him lessen his guilt or make it disappear altogether? If the pattern of their votes shows bias, which cannot fail to escape even the blind, only the nagbubulag-bulagan, then they deserve to be impeached too. Then they deserve to be kicked out too.

The justification of a collegial decision is not unlike the justification for cheating in the elections on the ground that “everybody cheats anyway.” That was expressly how an archbishop justified “Hello Garci.” What’s the logic: Everybody cheats anyway, so, that makes Arroyo innocent? Wrong. Everybody cheats anyway, so that makes the others guilty too. Collective guilt doesn’t make the collective innocent, it just makes the collective equally guilty. Or since Arroyo’s scale of cheating dwarfed that of others, it just makes her guiltier primus inter pares. Or since Corona’s scale of shamelessness crowns him peerless, it just makes him guiltier primus inter pares.

Collegiality may not save Corona, it may only damn his fellows. It may not free Corona, it may only indict the Supreme Court itself. It may only make us realize that there is no justice in the justices, at least insofar as they are currently constituted. It may only make us realize there is nothing supreme about the Supreme Court other than a capacity for supreme folly. The collective conscription of law to serve the ends of tyranny is not the rule of law. The collective distortion of law for the greater glory of Gloria, or at least to keep her beyond the reach of the law, is not the rule of law.

It is mob rule.