VICE President Sara Duterte has now posted bail in the three grave threats cases filed against her. Yet her lawyers continue to insist that the Quezon City Regional Trial Court (RTC) has no jurisdiction because, as an impeachable official, she supposedly enjoys limited procedural immunity from criminal prosecution while she remains in office.
This is not a frivolous argument. But neither should it be casually transformed into the sweeping proposition that an impeachable official is automatically immune from criminal prosecution. That conclusion is far more problematic than Duterte’s defenders make it appear.
This is not a frivolous argument. But neither should it be casually transformed into the sweeping proposition that an impeachable official is automatically immune from criminal prosecution. That conclusion is far more problematic than Duterte’s defenders make it appear.
The Constitution is clear about one thing. The president, vice president, members of the Supreme Court, members of the constitutional commissions and the Ombudsman may be removed from office only through impeachment. Article XI protects the tenure of these officials by preventing ordinary administrative or disciplinary proceedings from becoming alternative mechanisms for removing them.
But protection from removal is not necessarily the same thing as protection from criminal process.
Article XI, Section 3(7) expressly distinguishes impeachment from criminal liability. Judgment in impeachment extends only to removal and possible disqualification from public office. The convicted official remains liable for prosecution, trial and punishment according to law. Impeachment therefore serves a political and constitutional purpose: determining whether an official remains fit to hold an office entrusted with exceptional authority. A criminal proceeding serves another purpose: determining whether a crime was committed and whether criminal punishment should follow.
The difficulty is that the Supreme Court itself complicated this distinction in its July 25, 2025 decision in Duterte v. House of Representatives. The Court spoke of “limited procedural immunity for impeachable public officers” and said that impeachable officers enjoy a certain degree of immunity while in office. It cited jurisprudence stating that an impeachable officer cannot be criminally prosecuted for the same offenses constituting grounds for impeachment while the officer remains in office.
Duterte’s lawyers therefore have something substantial to cite. Their theory was not manufactured from thin air.
But the same decision contains language pointing in another direction. It expressly states that impeachment does not imply immunity from court processes and that impeachable officers are not immune from liability for wrongdoing. The immunity, according to the Court, is procedural rather than absolute.
There lies the constitutional tension that now demands clarification.
One must ask what exactly impeachment immunity is intended to protect. If its purpose is to prevent another institution from effectively removing an impeachable official through administrative sanctions, disbarment, suspension or some equivalent device, the doctrine is understandable. The Constitution created impeachment precisely because certain officers should not be politically or institutionally disabled by ordinary disciplinary mechanisms.
But a criminal prosecution is different if it does not itself remove the official from office.
Suppose an impeachable officer commits homicide in a private quarrel. Suppose a constitutional commissioner drives while intoxicated and kills someone. Suppose a justice commits tax fraud unrelated to judicial work. Suppose a vice president issues a private threat having nothing to do with the constitutional functions of the vice presidency. Must the State remain powerless to prosecute until that official resigns, finishes a term or is first impeached and convicted?
If the answer is yes simply because the accused is impeachable, then the Constitution has silently created a class of public officials temporarily beyond the reach of ordinary criminal law. That is an extraordinary privilege to derive from constitutional text that never expressly grants it.
The better distinction is between immunity necessary to preserve constitutional tenure and immunity from accountability for ordinary criminal conduct.
This matters greatly in Duterte’s case. The grave threats charges arose from statements in which she said that she had arranged for President Ferdinand Marcos Jr., first lady Liza Araneta-Marcos and then-House speaker Martin Romualdez to be killed if she herself were killed. Those statements also became part of the impeachment controversy. But threatening another person’s life is hardly an official function of the vice president.
The question, therefore, should not simply be whether Duterte is an impeachable officer. It should be whether the Constitution intended impeachability to suspend the operation of criminal law even for alleged conduct outside legitimate official functions.
The Quezon City RTC has answered that question, at least for now, against Duterte. It denied her motion to quash, found probable cause to hold her for trial and issued the arrest warrant. Duterte subsequently appeared and posted bail.
Her lawyers are free to challenge the ruling before a higher court. Indeed, because the Supreme Court itself used broad language about limited procedural immunity in 2025, the controversy deserves definitive resolution.
But the Court should be careful about what doctrine it ultimately creates.
The presidency has traditionally received special immunity while the president remains in office because of the unique constitutional responsibilities of the chief executive. Extending comparable immunity automatically to every impeachable official simply because impeachment is the mode of removal would transform a protection of constitutional independence into a shield against criminal process.
That could produce consequences far beyond Sara Duterte.
A doctrine that says otherwise would create a strange constitutional hierarchy: Citizens answer to criminal courts immediately, while selected officials could demand that criminal accountability wait simply because they occupy offices protected by an extraordinary method of removal.
The Constitution begins Article XI with a principle more fundamental than the procedural details of impeachment: Public office is a public trust. Public officials must remain accountable to the people. Immunity doctrines should therefore be construed only as broadly as necessary to protect constitutional functions, not expanded into privileges unnecessary to those functions.
Sara Duterte cannot be removed from the vice presidency by an RTC. That power belongs to the impeachment process and ultimately to the Senate sitting as an impeachment court. But it does not necessarily follow that an RTC is constitutionally forbidden from determining whether she committed an ordinary crime.
We should not confuse constitutional protection with constitutional impunity.
Being impeachable means that there is a special constitutional method for removing you from office. It should not automatically mean that, while occupying that office, you become untouchable by criminal law.
The author is a professor at UP Los Banos and vice chairman of the board of PTVNI.
