Our friend Caesar, upon coming home from abroad, caught his wife in bed with their plumber. Stunned, the wife thundered: “You, imbecile, you should have called first! This is all your fault! You broke the rule!”
That is exactly what the defense panel is doing in the impeachment trial of Chief Justice Renato Corona. In light of overwhelming evidence of unexplainable wealth stashed in secret bank accounts (which, by law, is presumed filthy lucre), his lawyers are crying foul: The prosecutors broke all rules on bank secrecy! Without the depositor’s consent, they had no right to bring those accounts to light. It’s their fault if all those bank records would now be rendered inadmissible in evidence as “fruit of the poisoned tree”!
It is droll, were it not so tragic as well. Most of the senator-judges (notably Miriam Defensor-Santiago who once wrote some literature on how to fight graft and corruption in government, and Joker Arroyo whose election battle cry was “pag bad ka, lagot ka”) seem to be of the same frame of mind.
—STEVE Y. VESPERA, ESQ.,
styves8888@yahoo.com