A new court rule

Public attention on the Supreme Court in the last several days has necessarily focused on the politics of the appointment of Chief Justice Maria Lourdes Sereno—the suddenness of the announcement, the surprise of a truly deep selection, the seeming snub she seems to have suffered from the senior justices she had bypassed, her supposed debt of gratitude to President Aquino (and, by extension, the Cojuangco side of his family), even (most recently) her unsolicited references to the Almighty. Everyone loves to follow a winner—perhaps especially when drama and intrigue surround the winning.

But news out of the Supreme Court on Tuesday shifts the focus back to its real work: the adjudication of cases and, above that, the ever-more-effective pursuit of justice.

Voting unanimously, the justices approved the so-called judicial affidavit rule, a procedural reform which will take effect next year and which is intended to speed up trial proceedings by effectively foregoing the oral direct testimony of witnesses. As Christine Avendaño’s report in yesterday’s issue noted: “This means that the witnesses will be ‘subjected to cross examination’ immediately and [will] ‘cut short by 50 percent the presentation of witnesses,’ according to Deputy Court Administrator Raul Villanueva, who was designated the court’s new ‘communicator for judicial reform.’”

The concept was pilot-tested at the Quezon City Regional Trial Court beginning in April; that is, when Renato Corona was still chief justice. It was recommended for approval by the man commonly perceived as Corona’s chief rival in the high court, Senior Associate Justice Antonio Carpio, and by Associate Justice Roberto Abad, both candidates for the position Sereno now holds. It is a credit to everyone in the high court, then, that the new rule appears to have been approved on the basis of the results of the test program and a general commitment to judicial reform, rather than on previous or frayed loyalties.

From the looks of it, the new rule allows courts across the country to jump-start trials, so to speak, by accepting the affidavits (written according to certain safeguards) in lieu of direct testimony. At the same time, the rule adheres to a hard-earned culture of civil liberties: It is limited to the civil aspects of a criminal case, to criminal cases where the maximum penalty does not exceed six years, and to graver cases (murder, for instance) only if the defendant agrees.

We will be interested to know the results of the program tested at the Quezon City RTC, one of the country’s busiest, and what the affected accused have to say about the new rule. It appears to be a sensible reform, but we must be alert to possible, perhaps unsuspected, vulnerabilities in the new procedure: Since it privileges the act of writing (the affidavit), will indigent or uneducated defendants find themselves at an additional disadvantage? We can imagine cases where a slick lawyer utilizes the cross-examination to contrast an ill-educated witness’ answers with the perhaps imprecise language he used in his affidavit. If there is a corresponding move to allow affidavits written (or taken) in any language into the record, perhaps this will help mitigate the bias against the in- or less, articulate.

But we trust that the high court, and the country’s judges, will institute or follow safeguards to make the new rule a genuine advance in the pursuit of justice.

Many more, much more major, reforms lie in wait; indeed, the mandate of any post-Corona Supreme Court was always to embrace the cause of judicial reform itself: to depoliticize the judiciary, to reverse the high court’s reputation in the last years of the presidency of Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo as a cozy legal club with its own set of rules, to become more transparent in its transactions (without losing the necessary and enabling mystique essential to the crafting of truly independent decisions), to hold itself, the one nonpolitical branch of government, more accountable to the people it represents but who cannot vote for it. Not least, to be effective in the pursuit of justice.

The new rule of court, by providing for speedier trials, promises to do just that.