THE much-ballyhooed claim of the prosecution that it has the evidence to indict and convict Vice President Sara Zimmerman Duterte is crumbling. Its presentation of evidence to prove the impeachable offense of betrayal of public trust against VP Sara has ended, but it has failed to prove through its three witnesses from the National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) that her subject remarks constituted the crimes of grave threats and inciting to sedition, which alleged commission formed the basis of charging her under Article IV of the impeachment complaint.
The NBI witnesses proved that their investigation was theatrical. It relied on the bare remarks of VP Sara, reasoning that they were made in the heat of anger and coming from the vice president herself, then it must be true. There is no proof extant that the utterances were intended as a real and serious threat — assuming it to be one — to the said officials she identified as behind the plan to assassinate her despite the fact that such utterances were hypothetical and conditioned on the realization of the threat against her life.
Had the NBI investigators thoroughly probed the antecedent circumstances culminating in the controversial remarks, the active threat against the life of VP Sara would have been established. It was a matter of defense and survival. She had to reveal it to the public, not only to unmask the individuals she mortally feared to be her would-be assassins but also to call on the public to bring them to justice for retribution.
The admission that they were not able to establish that VP Sara had contracted an assassin to kill the named officials debunks the prosecution’s claim that there is an active threat against them.
Illuminating is the fact that the two NBI witnesses, namely, Jeremy Lotoc and Melvin Matibag, admitted, on the witness stand, that from the time the allegedly threatening and seditious utterances were made by VP Sara, there were no reported acts of violence made by any group of citizens as a consequence thereof nor did she attend any antigovernment rallies, repudiating the prosecution’s theory that the very verbalizations of VP Sara incited the people to revolt against the government and that her narratives completed the crimes of grave threats and inciting to sedition.
Moreover, the witnesses not only did not have the competence, with John Mark Calilung testifying as an expert witness in cyberlibel when he is not, plus the fact that he is accused in the Office of the Ombudsman of multiple crimes, including perjury, crimes involving moral turpitude like using a search warrant minus the required protocols, all of which he did not deny, showed he is biased as well. Matibag was even worse, a discredited witness, a full-bodied biased one. He exhibited extreme dislike or hatred of the person of the vice president, as evidenced by the three hateful columns he wrote against VP Sara in The Daily Tribune, to which fact he did not dispute. He also admitted his congresswoman wife had voted to impeach VP Sara. He admitted not having personal knowledge of the two previous investigations made by his subordinates done prior to his appointment as head of the NBI. Like Lotoc, he admitted not having investigated the active threat against the life of the impeached official, which is a must to determine what triggered the outburst of VP Sara, and the context under which it was made.
Matibag’s attempt at showing the violent character of the respondent official by introducing a pattern of violence, by recalling a punching incident of a court sheriff who was bent on implementing a demolition order against informal settlers, falls flat on its face, as it was only one incident, destroying the claim there was a “pattern of violence” in VP Sara’s character. The incident, far from showing a streak of violence, showed that the timely, authoritative intervention of then-mayor Sara prevented what could have been a violent and tragic incident.
The prosecution succeeded in putting on the record a paper which it passed off as a copy of an affidavit of one Arturo Lascañas filed in the International Court (ICC) in connection with the ongoing case against former president Rodrigo Duterte. Lascañas, who “confessed” to being a member of the media-created Duterte Death Squad (DDS), claimed that VP Sara was part of “tokhang,” a police operation that allegedly targeted drug pushers and addicts who were extrajudicially executed. He claimed that VP Sara was part of the police project. According to Sen. Panfilo Lacson, the Blue Ribbon Committee had recommended that Lascañas be charged with perjury after he recanted his original testimony on ex-president Duterte not having to do with any extrajudicial killing in Davao City, meaning, he lied under oath when he testified in the said committee.
In a monumental faux pax, the incorrigible and annoying presiding officer, despite the repeated objections of defense lawyer Michael Poa, allowed the introduction of the inadmissible scrap of paper containing the alleged statement of Lascañas submitted to the ICC. The document was unsigned and not notarized. Under the rules, it is inadmissible as evidence, and its contents are hearsay. Matibag could not testify on the purported document, as he was not the author of the allegations contained there nor did he have any personal knowledge of them; hence, he did not qualify as a competent witness. Moreover, the prosecution had not established that the contents of the affidavit were the exact reproduction of the Lascañas affidavit filed at the ICC. Despite this glaring procedural defect, the presiding officer allowed it.
LandBank witnesses worthless
The two former officials from LandBank, namely Violeta Constantino and Nenita Camposano, were worthless witnesses. They testified to the procedure on the cash withdrawals of the checks representing the confidential funds of the Office of the Vice President (OVP) and the Department of Education (DepEd), when VP Sara headed those offices. Both testified that the said offices followed the protocols in withdrawing the funds.
Both stated that while they found the massive withdrawals unusual because of the enormity of the amount, such withdrawals were not illegal.
Their presentation as witnesses was worthless because what they testified to was in dispute; hence, the decision of the defense team not to cross-examine them was correct, as it would have been a waste of time. The no cross-examination of the witnesses should have already alerted the senator-judges that questioning the two witnesses would be unnecessary and irrelevant. While a few of the senators had the common sense not to propound queries to the two witnesses, there were others who did — which only unnecessarily and vexingly prolonged the proceeding.
For some people, the chance to be on the television screen was too tempting to resist. Just like the three members of the panel of prosecutors who used the impeachment trial to advertise themselves and prove their case by their publicity stunts and pesky speeches and not through their witnesses, but not without the help of the presiding officer.
