AT least seven progressive party-list lawmakers yesterday demanded the resignation of  three justices of Sandiganbayan Second Division responsible behind the approval of the plea bargain between former Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) Comptroller Carlos Garcia and the Office of the Ombudsman.

Reps. Teodoro “Teddy” Casiño and Neri Colmenares (Bayan Muna), Luz Ilagan and Emmi De Jesus (Gabriela), Rafael Mariano (Anakpawis), Raymond Palatino (Kabataan) and Antonio Tinio (Alliance of Concerned Teachers), who are part of the Makabayan Coalition, filed House Resolution (HR) No. 1237 expressing their strong disgust over the decision.

“By approving the Garcia plea bargain, Justices Edilberto Sandoval, Teresita Diaz-Baldos and Samuel Martires proved themselves no better than Gutierrez when it comes to allegedly protecting the corrupt. If she betrayed the public trust, so did the Sandiganbayan. If she resigned, so should they,” said Casiño, the spokesman of the group.

The Sandiganbayan ruling will exonerate Garcia and his family from the P303-million plunder charge and alleged violation of Anti-Money Laundering Law after they returned the P135.433 million to the government.

In the said resolution, they said that the Sandiganbayan Second Division “unanimously, but suspiciously and hastily, approved on May 9 the plea bargain agreement. It previously denied Garcia’s petition for bail on the charge of plunder, thereby declaring that the evidence of guilt was strong. However, it justified its latest decision to approve the plea bargain by declaring that the prosecution’s evidence was weak.”

“It must be noted that the House and the Senate also came out with reports and resolutions finding irregularities in the plea bargain agreement and strongly recommending its withdrawal,” said Casiño.

The Makabayan bloc lawmakers also said that “the implication of the Sandiganbayan’s decision approving the plea bargain agreement is shocking and staggering, because with this, one can still feel the actions done by former Ombudsman Navarro-Gutierrez even if she already resigned.”

“The Sandiganbayan justices cannot play deaf and blind to the fact that Guttierez was impeached by the House of Representatives for betraying public trust by her gross inexcusable, in fact deliberate, inaction and mishandling of big-time cases including the Garcia plea bargain deal,”  they added.

In saying that the Sandiganbayan justices “acted with undue and suspicious haste to approve the Garcia plea bargain deal immediately after the resignation of Gutierrez, thereby pre-empting any effort by the incoming Ombudsman to remedy the mistakes of the former Ombudsman.”

“The ruling of the Sandiganbayan will serve as a bad precedent -- in a way telling unscrupulous government officials to steal big so that they can enter a similar agreement.  It is not just the AFP funds but the public funds that Garcia plundered, thus, the Sandiganbayan should not have rejected the motion for intervention of the Solicitor General upon the directives of President Aquino and backed by Congress,” said Casiño.

“The resignation of Gutierrez started the cleansing process in our anti-graft bodies. We started with the Ombudsman,” Casiño added.