WE are now being told that the impeachment trial of Vice President Sara Duterte must be abbreviated because people are losing interest. The proceedings, we are warned, are becoming overlong. If they continue at their present pace, they may drag on beyond Christmas.
This is a troubling way to frame a constitutional process. Impeachment is not a television show whose continuation depends on audience ratings. Its purpose is neither to entertain the public nor produce a verdict before the holiday season.
Its purpose is to determine the truth about grave accusations against a high public official while giving that official a fair opportunity to answer. That duty does not disappear when people become impatient. Constitutional accountability cannot be hostage to an audience’s attention span.
Efficiency is legitimate. Repetitive questions can be avoided, witnesses managed better and lawyers required to focus on relevant facts. But efficiency means removing waste from the process, not removing charges merely because proving them takes time.
The repeated warnings about the trial extending beyond Christmas reveal a disturbing inversion of priorities. The calendar is becoming more important than the evidence. Instead of asking how much time is reasonably necessary to uncover the truth, some officials seem to be asking how much truth can be accommodated before December.
Christmas is not a constitutional deadline. It may be a convenient political target for senators and prosecutors who want closure before the new year. But convenience cannot determine accountability. If evidence requires proceedings beyond Christmas, they should continue.
The senator-judges are not alone in displaying this preoccupation with time. Even the House prosecution panel is contemplating skipping the article on alleged bribery so that it can proceed to the article on unexplained wealth and shorten the trial. Prosecutor Joel Chua has said that the panel does not want a protracted hearing and hopes for a verdict by December.
That possibility should alarm the public. The House presumably did not frame the bribery article casually. Its committee conducted hearings, examined witnesses and documents, found probable cause and transmitted the article to the Senate as a formal accusation.
Having done all that, prosecutors now appear ready to treat the accusation as dispensable, not necessarily because it has been disproven, but because presenting it could take too long. This raises an unavoidable question: If the charge was serious enough to impeach Sara Duterte, how can it become unnecessary merely because December is approaching?
Dropping the bribery article would do an injustice to Duterte herself. Once the House publicly accuses an official of bribery, the accusation becomes part of her political and historical record. She should not be left under the shadow of a charge that prosecutors themselves decline to prove, while being denied the formal opportunity to confront the evidence and answer the allegation fully.
An accused official is entitled to a fair resolution of the charges formally brought against her. Prosecutors cannot place an accusation before the nation, damage her reputation, then abandon it for scheduling. If the evidence is weak, expose that weakness. If strong, present it.
Abandoning the article would also be unjust to the public. The people were told that the House found probable cause to believe that bribery occurred. They are entitled to know what evidence supported that conclusion, how the defense answers it and what the senator-judges make of the competing claims. The public is owed a resolution, not an unfinished allegation.
This is why impeachment cannot be understood solely as a mechanism for securing enough votes to convict. Constitutionally, conviction on one article may be sufficient to remove and disqualify an official. Strategically, prosecutors may therefore believe that they should concentrate on what they consider their strongest case.
But the constitutional trial has a purpose larger than prosecutorial strategy. It is also a process of public truth-telling. It establishes an official record of what was alleged, what evidence was presented, what explanations were offered and what judgments were reached. That record belongs not only to the litigants, but also to citizens and history.
The objective should therefore not simply be to find Sara Duterte guilty of at least one article, assuming the evidence justifies conviction. It should be to discover the entire truth about all accusations solemnly approved by the House. A constitutional process diminished into vote counting may achieve removal, but it can still fail accountability.
Public interest will naturally rise and fall. Some hearing days will command national attention, while others will seem technical, tedious or repetitive. Evidence often develops slowly. Documentary foundations must be established, witnesses examined, objections resolved and the defense heard. Truth is rarely packaged for prime-time consumption.
If waning interest becomes a reason to abbreviate proceedings, powerful officials gain an incentive to delay, distract and exhaust the public. Accountability would then weaken precisely because a case is complicated. The longer the paper trail and the more tortuous the inquiry, the easier it would become to argue that citizens have stopped watching.
The proper response to declining interest is not to sacrifice substance, but to improve public communication. Explain the issues clearly. Organize the evidence coherently. Avoid grandstanding, needless repetition and too much overjudicialization. Help citizens understand why each witness and document matters without pretending that constitutional truth must always be dramatic and clothed in legalese.
The Senate and the House prosecution panel should certainly respect time, but they must respect truth more. They should streamline the trial without amputating it, discipline the proceedings without prejudging them and pursue a timely verdict without imposing an artificial deadline that makes an entire accusation expendable.
Sara Duterte deserves the opportunity to answer every charge that the House formally lodged against her. The Filipino people deserve to hear those answers and judge the evidence. Whether the result is conviction or acquittal, the legitimacy of the outcome will depend on whether the process pursued the whole truth rather than the quickest ending.
Impeachment is not a television show. The Constitution does not change the channel when ratings fall, and accountability should not adjourn because it’s Christmas.
The author is a professor at the UP Los Baños School of Environmental Science and Management (UPLB-Sesam) and vice chairman of the People’s Television Network Inc. (PTVNI).
