WHEN Atty. Shiela Sison called Vice President Sara Duterte’s impeachment “persecution,” she cast her client as victim and prosecutors as abusers. The word is powerful, but it cannot do the work of evidence.
Persecution is not investigation, accusation, or public embarrassment. It is power abused to punish without legitimate grounds. Is this impeachment invented, or does evidence warrant an answer? The record gives Sison no honest basis to pretend the question is settled. Impeachment may be political, but that does not make it groundless. The Constitution names culpable violation and betrayal of public trust as grounds for removal. The Senate, not Sison, decides that question. Her client is being asked to account for conduct already placed before the public and the impeachment court.
The threat against President Ferdinand Marcos Jr., First Lady Liza Marcos, and former speaker Martin Romualdez was not whispered in a secret room and planted by prosecutors. Duterte herself publicly said she had arranged for an assassin to kill them if she were killed. Later explanations cannot make those words disappear. A vice president’s public threat is a grave matter of public trust. In fact, there is already a live criminal case filed against her.
The confidential funds controversy is not merely an allegation in an impeachment complaint. The Commission on Audit affirmed with finality the disallowance of P 73.287 million spent by the Office of the Vice President in December 2022, finding the records insufficient under the rules. That is not a criminal conviction or an impeachment verdict. It is an official audit ruling. Sison cannot erase it by acting offended that the public remembers it.
Article II, is no fantasy either. It alleges that Duterte failed to fully declare assets in her SALNs, accumulated wealth disproportionate to lawful income, and retained business interests barred by the Constitution. The prosecution presented AMLC, bank, insurance, tax and corporate records. Forensic accountant Alexander Cabrera connected the financial trail. The Senate must decide whether that evidence proves the allegations. But documents do not become persecution because they are more difficult to answer than a slogan.
On October 13, lead House prosecutor Gerville Luistro announced that the prosecution would pursue Article II alone, saying its evidence was enough. The Senate court accepted withdrawal of Articles I, III and IV. Sison’s reply was to call the move unfair, raise due process, and invoke persecution. A defense lawyer may object, especially after evidence on some counts has been heard. The impeachment court itself warned prosecutors against presenting charges and then abruptly abandoning them. That is a real procedural concern. It is not proof that the entire case is persecution.
But listen to the performance. Sison spoke as if her client had been stripped of every chance to answer. The court ruled that withdrawn articles would not go to a vote or verdict, so the defense need not present a separate evidentiary case against them. It may rely on material already in the record when relevant to Article II. And Article III, the bribery charge, had not reached witness presentation. Prosecutors called none of its five listed witnesses. To portray all three withdrawals as three full cases that the defense was forbidden to rebut is theatrical, not accurate.
Sison complained that Duterte was being denied a platform. Yet the defense cross-examined prosecution witnesses for hours and days, displayed documents and videos in court, and says it will present evidence on the surviving charge. Duterte herself has not physically participated in the hearings, while speaking to the public through press conferences and social media. She cannot stay away from the impeachment trial venue and then have her lawyer sell the country a story of silencing. The record and her own public presence make that complaint ring hollow.
The prosecution’s decision to drop three articles was a power move, and a tactical masterstroke. It narrowed the trial to the charge backed by a dense documentary trail, spared the court 32 witnesses, and cut off weeks of further diversion. The battleground is now where the defense is least comfortable: AMLC data, bank and insurance records, tax and corporate filings, and Cabrera’s analysis. Sison’s theatrics could not restore the wider stage on which Sara might deflect, blame subordinates, or plead ignorance.
One can acknowledge the court’s warning to prosecutors without pretending that the defense was persecuted. Withdrawal has consequences. Due process deserves protection. But Sison did not stop at a focused legal objection. She turned a narrowing of charges into a morality play, as if her client’s discomfort were proof of injustice. The courtroom became a stage, and the lawyer’s indignation the featured act.
A lawyer’s job is to test evidence, expose errors and protect client rights. Sison can challenge Cabrera’s methods and ask senator-judges to reject his conclusions. Instead of functioning as a legal team, they look like cast members in a scripted performance whose purpose was to drag the proceedings until it bored us all. The prosecution’s narrowing move thwarted it. Her persecution refrain turns attention from the records to Sara’s victim act. That is theater in legal robes performed for the diehard Duterte supporters.
Rodrigo Duterte made politics a theater of staged outrage and dramatic confrontation, casting himself as the people’s protector while diverting attention from state abuses. His daughter now borrows that script. Sara performs the persecuted victim to shift attention from her own culpability, while her defense team delivers the lines, turning legal objections into courtroom dramatic speeches of indignation.
Sara Duterte is entitled to a fair hearing and to the presumption that Article II must be proved. She is also a constitutional officer who must account for public money, truthful declarations and prohibited business interests. The public threat is now a case where she is presumed innocent until proven otherwise. The COA disallowance is final as an audit ruling. The wealth and SALN allegations remain undecided in the impeachment court. Those distinctions matter. So does the distinction between persecution and accountability. Sison may denounce the prosecution’s tactics, but she cannot make a victim out of her client by repeating the word often enough.
The author is a professor at the University of the Philippines Los Baños and vice chairman of the board of PTV Network, Inc.
