ACQUITTAL BY SENATE 'POSSIBLE'
MANILA, DECEMBER 31,
2011 (MANILA TIMES) (PHOTO - Chief Justice
Renato Corona) Aquino lacks numbers for conviction.
President Benigno Aquino 3rd may have won the battle against Supreme Court
(SC) Chief Justice Renato Corona but not the war in his apparent pressure on the
Senate impeachment court to hand
down a guilty verdict against the country's top magistrate.
Malacañang on Friday admitted that it lacks the numbers among senators that
would ensure conviction of Corona on charges leveled against him by the House of
Representatives, which earlier impeached him.
"That [acquittal of the Chief Justice] is a possibility. We are not closed to
that kind of possibility.
While we are confident that Corona will be impeached, confidence is different
from certainty," its chief political adviser Ronald Llamas said.
"We are not sure [if we have the numbers in the Senate]. That will depend on
the senators and the evidence that will be presented. That will be the decisive
factor, although other factors may come into play," he added.
Llamas said that voting in the Senate impeachment court might be affected by
the 2013 elections, specially by those who are running for reelection and those
who will field their relatives.
"Although it will not be the dominant variable, let us not forget that an
impeachment process is not a purely legal process. It is also a political
process," he added.
Meanwhile, Llamas denied statements made on Thursday by Palace deputy
spokesman Abigail Valte that the Aquino administration had prepared a Plan B if
the Chief Justice was acquitted by the senator-judges.
"We have not yet talked about that in Malacañang," he said.
President Aquino earlier asked his legal advisers to draft a list of possible
replacements for Corona even if there is no vacancy yet in the country's highest
judicial post.
This early, lawmakers are accusing Corona of delaying the impeachment trial.
In a text message, Rep. Ben Evardone of Easten Samar also on Friday said that
the Senate would take half a year to verify if all the lawmakers who voted to
remove the Chief Justice affixed their signatures to the eight Articles of
Impeachment that the House sent to the Senate.
Rep. Rodolfo Farinas of Ilocos Norte, a member of the Hose prosecution team,
this week admitted that he did not.
According to Evardone, if the Senate impeachment court decided to determine
first the issue of verification, each of the 188 congressmen who signed the
complaint would be put on the witness stand to "state whether they read the
resolution" that ousted Corona.
He was reacting to Corona's defense team earlier filing a motion for
preliminary hearing before the impeachment court, a move that would prevent the
trial from proceeding as scheduled early next year.
Standing in the path of the defense is a perceived enemy of Corona.
Associate Justice Antonio Carpio, according to a source of The Manila Times,
will write the ruling on a consolidated petition for certiorari seeking to stop
the senator-judges from holding the impeachment trial.
Carpio supposedly had hoped that then-President Gloria Arroyo would appoint
him as Chief Justice but the post eventually went to Corona.
Consolidated were four petitions filed by Danilo Lihaylihay, lawyer Vladimir
Cabigao, former Integrated Bar of the Philippines president Vicente Millora and
human-rights lawyer Oliver Lozano.
The petitions were raffled off to different justices, with the lowest docket
number going to Carpio.
Under the Internal Rules of the High Tribunal, different petitions anchored
on the same legal grounds shall be consolidated and the ponente will be the
magistrate who gets the lowest docket number. Lihaylihay's petition had the
lowest number.
The four petitioners had asked the Supreme Court to nullify the eight
Articles of Impeachment, the product of a "conspiracy" between Mr. Aquino and
the lawmakers and "undue haste." With reports from Ruben D.
Manahan 4th and Llanesca T. Panti
Chief News Editor: Sol Jose Vanzi
© Copyright, 2011 by PHILIPPINE HEADLINE NEWS ONLINE
All
rights reserved
PHILIPPINE
HEADLINE NEWS ONLINE [PHNO] WEBSITE
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