First Word
WE are now in week 3 of the impeachment trial of Vice President Sara Duterte-Carpio at the Senate. But it seems as if the nation has already been weighing her guilt or innocence for a whole year. Partisans and media people have battered each other silly and hoarse in endorsing or opposing Sara’s possible removal from office. Newspapers have headlined the trial daily to the point of catatonia.
Yet to this day, no one from the House of Representatives as exclusive impeacher or one from the Senate as sole trier and judge of the impeached has ventured to present in a concise, coherent and cogent way the gravamen of the impeachment case against the vice president.
What is gravamen?
One does not need a law degree or a postgraduate record to delve into the notion of gravamen in the hearing or trial of cases. I claim here only my right as a citizen and journalist to join the national conversation on the wisdom or unwisdom of impeaching the freely and duly elected second highest official of our republic.
Gravamen is a term in the science and study of law that should impel everyone to examine critically all the articles of impeachment against the vice president in order to keep abreast of every happening in the case. Merriam Webster dictionary is revealing in its note online on the term gravamen. It says: gravamen is not a word you hear every day (even rarer is gravamina, the less expected of its two plural forms; gravamens is the other), but it does show up occasionally in modern-day publications. It comes from the Latin verb gravare, meaning “to burden,” and ultimately from the Latin adjective gravis, meaning “heavy.” Fittingly, gravamen refers to the part of a grievance or complaint that gives it weight or substance. In legal contexts, gravamen is used to refer to the grounds on which a legal action is allowed or upheld as valid.
Similarly, the American Heritage dictionary defines gravamen as “the part of a charge or accusation that weighs most substantially against the accused. Gravamen thus refers to the core, essence, or most substantial part of a complaint or accusation. It is the central element that gives a lawsuit or grievance its weight and makes it valid.”
Perhaps the most vivid and instructive use of gravamen in highly important cases occurred after the Second World War when a US military tribunal tried five German jurists for their role in the administration of justice in the Third Reich.
In a film on the trials, “Judgment at Nuremberg” which won for best picture in the academy awards in 1961, the presiding judge as played by Spencer Tracy drew a careful line between propaganda of the Jewish holocaust and the requirements of justice in describing what the jurists’ trials were. He said “simple murder and atrocities do not constitute the gravamen of the cases against the five German jurists.” He said this against a backdrop of film footage on the horrors of the Nazi death chambers and concentration camps, which were unwatchable.
In the early stage of the trial of VP Duterte, the prosecution has appeared to have a problem in articulating the gravamen of the impeachment charges against the vice president.
By electing to start the prosecution with the grave threats article of impeachment, the house managers arguably chose the weakest of the four articles for impeachment because assassinating or plotting to kill the president is nowhere cited in the 1987 Constitution as a ground for impeachment.
The hiring of a hitman is of course a very serious offense, particularly by the designated successor to the president, but the charge is easily blunted by a simple denial of a contract for a hit.
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