The obvious strategy of Chief Justice Renato Corona’s defense team led by the redoubtable, but nonetheless benign and courtly (but not quite yet patrician), ex-Justice Serafin Cuevas of the (martial law) Supreme Court is to finesse the evidence tending to show the untruthfulness of Corona’s statements of assets, liabilities and net worth (SALNs). For should the defense somehow manage to exclude such evidence, with the strenuous and prodigious assistance of the likes of Senator-Judges Miriam Santiago, Joker Arroyo and Jinggoy Estrada (in the case of Santiago and Arroyo, such assistance is open and willful; in Estrada’s, perhaps merely adventitious), the defense could—nay, would—claim that, legally, Corona should be exonerated as to the charge contained in Article 2 of the impeachment complaint.
However, the evidence as to the untruthfulness of Corona’s SALNs—especially with respect to his undervalued and concealed assets, and even more so his “secret” peso and dollar bank deposits, which he and Cuevas, and so too Miriam, guard with “jealous care”—is now, fortunately (but unfortunately for Corona), of public knowledge.
For such evidence is stark, glaring, flagrant—or, to borrow a telling phrase from the law on prescriptions, which is most apt and felicitous, even if rather racy, “open, naked and notorious.”
Ordinarily, an untruthful SALN, which is under oath, would expose the deceitful filer, such as Chief Justice Corona, to the risk of a possible indictment, minimally, for perjury. And possibly also, for ill-gotten wealth. And third, for tax evasion, should the relevant entries of the deceitful filer’s income tax returns do not match the counterpart entries in his untruthful SALN.
Perjury, ill-gotten wealth and tax evasion are, make no mistake about it, crimes. Such that the filer of an untruthful SALN—be he the chief magistrate of the land or the lowly court clerk of Davao, the hapless Delsa Flores—would be a criminal thrice over. Or, in common parlance, a crook.
Now the questions that push itself to the fore are:
First, do the present justices of the Supreme Court, both as individuals and/or members of a collegial body, in the “silence of their hearts,” be willing that Corona (such as he is or as widely perceived to be, namely, a crook) should continue to be the head, or the primus inter pares, of the high court?
Second, are the subordinate judges throughout the country—all justices of the Court of Appeals and other appellate or special courts, like the Sandiganbayan; all sitting judges of regional trial courts; and all city and municipal judges—willing to abide Corona as the head of the judicial branch of government?
Third, are the members of the Philippine Bar, both the practitioners and those who are not, willing that the chief magistrate of the land be like the likes of Corona?
Fourth, will the Philippine citizenry—from the loftiest to the lowest, from the most prosperous to the most penurious—be willing to project to the whole world that Corona be the face, or, as at were, the living, breathing, throbbing personification of justice in the Philippines?
Would that the Filipino people, in their sovereign capacity, provide an answer to the questions posed above, which narrow themselves to the issue of whether Corona is fit or unfit to continue in his high office.
A word more and I am done: It is said, rather frequently, that violations of the SALN law are, paradoxically, the norm, rather than the opposite. For such violations are, and have always been, rampant, reckless, wholesale and, what is worse, witting—which may include as “violators” some or all of the sitting senator-judges of the impeachment court, and also some or all of the House or public prosecutors.
These rampant, reckless, wholesale and witting violations, if true, should qualify the SALN law as a veritable “dead letter” or “legal lumber”—like the law that outlaws excessive spending in elections, which makes an election nothing more than the outright purchase of public office, high and low.
Accordingly, because of the “status” of the SALN law as a dead letter or legal lumber, should Chief Justice Corona now be exonerated of the charge contained in Article 2 of the impeachment complaint, on the same ground as that which spared the life of the adulteress in the Old (or New) Testament from being stoned to death, on the Biblical injunction “He who is without sin cast the first stone”?
Whether such a ground is substantial or merely technical, I am most willing, unreservedly, to yield to the “wise” opinion of the wily, crafty and cunning ex-Justice Cuevas, whose much-displayed learning and erudition should crown him as the master par excellence of what Sir Edward Coke, in November 1608, once called “the artificial reason and judgment of the law” (which even King James, then the reigning monarch of England, could not comprehend).
Jose C. Laureta is a professorial lecturer at the University of the Philippines College of Law.