(UPDATE) HOUSE prosecutors will present more than 30 witnesses during the impeachment trial of Vice President Sara Duterte, their pre-trial brief said.
House Secretary General Cheloy Garafil filed the prosecution panel’s pre-trial brief before the Senate, sitting as an impeachment court, on Monday afternoon.
“Number one, it contains stipulations of facts which will be presented for the other party’s either admission or denial,” Batangas 2nd District Rep. Gerville Luistro, the lead prosecutor, said in a press conference on Monday.
She said that stipulations would reduce the issues that parties would argue about during trial.
The pre-trial brief was expected to list the evidence and witnesses that the prosecution intends to present during the trial.
Luistro said there would be more than 30 witnesses.
At the same time, she said there would be no surprise witnesses, as the impeachment court has ruled that witnesses who are not named and evidence that are not marked in the pre-trial brief will not be presented.
“We will not compromise the necessity of presenting vital witnesses just to be able to have some surprises during the trial. No, that will not happen. Because it will compromise our case,” Luistro said.
During the impeachment trial of former president Joseph Estrada, the prosecution presented its surprise witness, Clarissa Ocampo, a former executive of Equitable PCI Bank, who testified on the signatures of the “Jose Velarde” account that was proved to be Estrada’s.
Luistro said the prosecution aims to explore the use of Filipino and other regional language translations during the trial to make the proceedings easier to understand.
They aim to raise the proposal on the pre-trial conference slated for June 18.
The prosecution, she added, wants the proceedings to be accessible to the public as they note that impeachment is a constitutional process that affects the Filipino people.
House Impeachment spokesman and Lanao del Sur Rep. Zia Alonto Adiong said discussions are also underway to make the impeachment proceedings more accessible, and said that the trial is expected to involve technical legal arguments and terminology that many Filipinos might find difficult to follow.
“Once the impeachment trial begins, the audience will be hearing technical legal terms that are not necessarily quite understandable,” Adiong said.
Asked who will preside in the impeachment trial, Luistro said they recognize Acting Senate President Sherwin Gatchalian, but called on the Senate to immediately resolve its leadership crisis to provide clarity on who will lead the chamber, which will constitute itself into an impeachment court.
She also said she is open to possibly revisiting the impeachment threshold due to the fact that some senators would either be arrested and suspended during the course of the trial.
Under the rules of the impeachment court, two-thirds of all senators are required to convict an impeachable official. The current threshold is at 16, but there are calls to revisit the threshold amid the possible arrests of more senators, citing the Supreme Court decision in Avelino vs Cuenco, which established that a quorum should be calculated based on the number of senators currently within the country and able to do their job, rather than the total number of elected seats.
“How are we going to consider them for the purpose of determining the threshold or the required number of votes? So in my personal opinion, I believe that the doctrine in Avellino should be applied also in determining the number of votes required for the purpose of conviction,” Luistro said.
