FORMER Supreme Court Associate Justice Serafin Cuevas, who heads the defense team of Chief Justice Renato Corona in his impeachment trial, is three years younger than Senate President Juan Ponce Enrile, 87.  Both are shining examples of senior citizens who, by sheer power of legal scholarship and mastery of their craft, are shaming lawyers several decades younger.

By his masterful navigation of the trial through uncharted  impeachment waters, Senator Enrile is demonstrating how an understanding of the spirit of the law, more than just the letter thereof, can be useful in moving the trial speedily but fairly.  Enrile has not only been fair to both prosecution and defense, but has oftentimes bent over backward to guide the younger and less- wise prosecutors along the way to speed up the process.

The defense team, on the other hand, hardly needs any help from Enrile in going about its work.  At times, it would even appear that Enrile and Cuevas are able to communicate with each other in legal shorthand because of the wisdom of their accumulated  experience.

Back to Plaza Miranda

To redeem lost honor, Chief House Prosecutor Rep. Niel Tupas begged for a few minutes at the end of the first four days of trial to request Enrile to remind Cuevas to refrain from “lecturing down” on the prosecutors on points of law.  His appeal came after a particularly amusing episode when Cuevas admonished his former student (whose name I will omit because it is not my intention to embarrass him further) who dared use a legal precedent he allegedly learned from Cuevas.

Cuevas quickly retorted that his former student, now a congressman, must have been absent when the point of law was discussed.  The audience laughed.

Over the weekend, the House prosecutors, as they are wont to do, took the case again before the bar of public opinion.  Here, where nobody is under oath and there is no Enrile to give them a rap in the knuckles, the House prosecutors went to town, so to speak.  Metaphorically, they took the case to Plaza Miranda, that historic plaza in front of Quiapo Church that earned a disreputable place in history for colorful political charges, truthful or concocted, to amuse the madding crowd.

‘To the barricades!’

Freed from the legal constraints of the impeachment rules, the House prosecutors, aided by allegedly impartial senator-judges who brazenly help them along when they got stalled in the presentation of evidence, publicly excoriated Cuevas for supposedly delaying the trial with his legal objections.

I was personally at the Senate gallery when this incident happened.  As was demonstrated that entire opening week of the trial, it was the ineptitude of the prosecution panel that delayed the trial. To cite a particular day of infamy, the prosecutors themselves asked for a postponement on the second day so that they could get their act together.

In the particular episode I witnessed, the House prosecutors were trying to pull a fast one by making out-of-order remarks while marking evidence.  Enrile explained that he was allowing them to proceed subject to objections by Cuevas because he wanted the public to understand the points of law that Cuevas was explaining through his objections.

A more masterful lawyer I still have to see when it comes to citing legal presidents off the top of his head.  Cuevas is 84 years old, but his years of experience and legal scholarship are clearly evident in the legal erudition he is showing at the trial.

Who is smarter?

But we should not underestimate the House prosecutors.  They may have been laggards in law school, but they certainly know how to get elected to Congress.  That means they know how to sway votes, which comes from a skill that wins the hearts and minds of   people. 

A perceptive observer of the trial is the eminent constitutional law expert Fr. Joaquin Bernas, a former dean of the Ateneo School of Law and a member of the Constitutional Commission that wrote the 1987 Constitution.

Digressing from his normal legal commentaries but noting a crucial point nonetheless, Fr. Bernas gave a nuanced observation on the opening statements of the prosecution and the defense teams.  Bernas said the style of defense lawyer Eduardo de los Angeles was “very professorial...orderly, legal and so forth.”

On the other hand, he said, Iloilo Congressman Tupas Jr.’s opening statement for the prosecution was delivered “Plaza Miranda” style to appeal to the popular sentiment.

Formality?

In a newspaper column, Fr. Ranhilio Aquino, dean of the San Beda Graduate School of Law, reminded the  senator-judges that any judgment that they would make should be based solely on evidence and the law.

He said: “I am therefore disturbed by suggestions that in deciding, the senators must be sensitive to popular sentiment. Stripped of the verbiage, the suggestion seems to be that senators should judge as popular sentiment would have them judge.

“If that is so, my question remains: Why go through the motions of a trial at all? Public sentiment is obviously against the Chief Justice. If the nation then is not to be treated to a long-running, expensive production of high drama with an already prepared script, then (the impeachment trial) must be an honest-to-goodness trial.”

Fr. Aquino, a lawyer, stressed that strict adherence to the Rule of Law prevents abuses by the state or by any citizen. He said: “Under the Rule of Law, a State is answerable to the law, as is any citizen. The State has to be controlled through institutional techniques especially designed to render possible the exercise of power and render its abuse impossible.”

“When agents of the State believe themselves empowered to act in any which way against any citizen, ex-President or ex-peace-loving, law-abiding Filipino, that is exactly when the problem of control becomes urgent,” Fr. Aquino said.

To use a colloquial expression, the emerging problem in the impeachment trial seems to be, Who will police the police?  That seems to be a job for the courts that are now, ironically, on trial.  This is when objections grounded in the spirit of the law serve the truth and, ultimately, justice.