HYPERTENSIVE Sen. Miriam Defensor-Santiago has apparently found a solution to her mercurial blood pressure.  She has requested Senate Majority Floor Leader Vicente Sotto III to schedule her meaty legal lecturettes at the start of the Senate impeachment trial of Chief Justice Renato Corona on the days the court is in session.

When she is given the floor at the start of the trial at around 2 p.m., Senator Santiago appears very calm because she has not been exposed yet to the inanities of her favourite House prosecutors and their retinue of private legal retainers.

Senator Santiago was a regional trial court judge, as she described it, “in another incarnation.”  She was one of the best, if not the best.  She also taught law at the University of the Philippines.  And she was one of the best, if not the best.

In brief, she knows her law.  But that is not what sends her blood pressure rising.  It’s the people who do not know their law.  She does not suffer fools gladly, legal or otherwise.

A serious student of the law in all its majesty, Senator Santiago takes her craft seriously.  She knows that the law is probably the culmination of all that is ennobling in the human experience.  The law, and its rigorous discipline, is what elevates civilized society from its stone-age roots. (“Cretin” is one of her favourite descriptions of the less intellectually disciplined.)

So, you do not trifle with her.  Even better, you do not trifle with the law in her presence.  On many occasions during the impeachment trial, she has lectured her favourite prosecutors on their ineptitude and ignorance of the law.

Curious solon

More recently, she has lectured a congressman who dared go to the Katipunan Avenue branch of PSBank to get more information from the branch manager on a bank document allegedly belonging to Mr. Corona.

The branch manager was shocked.  Such documents are absolutely confidential and protected by bank secrecy laws with strict penalties imposed on violators.

Senator Santiago could not resist the occasion to educate all and sundry.  She took the floor to read the riot act on the prosecutors because constituents asked her why the Senate  had spent more than week of trial time seeking to determine the source of the leaked, and therefore illegally obtained, document.

Stressing that “lawmakers should not be lawbreakers,” Senator Santiago read provisions from the  Anti-Money Laundering Act which penalize even the act of inquiring into bank accounts.  In other words,  the inquisitive congressman was guilty of a crime.

The good senator had to cut short her lecture because she started to hyperventilate and felt her blood pressure rising.  But she was back subsequently, this time armed with even more weighty legal points expressed in Latin.

Why Latin?

Non-lawyers have often wondered why the most important legal maxims are expressed in an extinct language.  My father, who was a lawyer, explained to me that most of our legal tenets came from the ancient Romans, who were the first to codify the law as an instrument of governing Pax Romana, or their colonial domination of the known world which resulted in peace (“pax”) for a hundred years.

To go back to Senator Santiago, she came back for the continuation of her lecturette armed with a Latin maxim, Falsus in unum, falsus in omnibus.  False in one particular, false in all particulars.

She said it was important to remember this legal maxim because the prosecutors had used an illegally sourced bank document to secure a subpoena from the Senate court to access other bank documents.  Since bank documents are strictly confidential, she reasoned, then the document presented to secure a subpoena must have been illegally obtained.

She went on to say that prosecutors, being officers of the court, have a responsibility to verify documents before using them in court.  To claim that these documents were left at the gate or handed over by an anonymous “little lady” does not absolve them of this ethical obligation to verify the truth, she stressed.

Falsus in unum, falsus in omnibus.

This leads us to another legal doctrine, this time arboreal in character.  It is called the Doctrine of the Poisonous Tree.

Legal metaphor

The Fruit of the Poisonous Tree is a legal metaphor in the United States used to describe evidence that is obtained illegally.  The logic of the terminology is that if the source of the evidence (the “tree”) is tainted, then anything gained from it (the “fruit”) is tainted as well, says Wikipedia.

Such evidence is not generally admissible in court. For example, if a police officer conducted an unconstitutional  search of a home and obtained a key to a train station locker, and evidence of a crime came from the locker, that evidence would most likely be excluded under the fruit of the poisonous tree doctrine.  The discovery of a witness is not evidence in itself because the witness is attenuated by separate interviews, in-court testimony and his or her own statements.

4 exceptions

The doctrine is an extension of the exclusionary rule, which, subject to some exceptions, prevents evidence obtained in violation of the Fourth Amendment  (of the US Constitution regarding illegal searches) from being admitted in a criminal trial. Like the exclusionary rule, the fruit of the poisonous tree doctrine is intended to deter police from using illegal means to obtain evidence.

The doctrine is subject to four main exceptions. The tainted evidence is admissible if:

1. it was discovered in part as a result of an independent, untainted source;

2. it would inevitably have been discovered despite the tainted source; or

3. the chain of causation between the illegal action and the tainted evidence is too attenuated; or

4. the search warrant not based on probable cause was executed by government agents in good faith (called the good faith exception).

For the benefit of legal scholars, the fruit of the poisonous tree doctrine stems from the 1920 case of Silverthorne Lumber Co. v. United States.

Forewarned is forearmed, although ignorance of the law excuses no one. Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.