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Leonen: SC ruling on De Lima arrest ‘deeply disturbing, unsettling’


The Supreme Court's ruling upholding the warrant of arrest against Senator Leila de Lima on drug-related charges is "deeply disturbing," Justice Marvic Leonen said in his dissenting opinion released on Friday.

“The majority's position may not have been surprising. Yet it is deeply disturbing,” Leonen said.

Nine justices — Teresita Leonardo-De Castro, Diosdado Peralta, Lucas Bersamin, Mariano Del Castillo, Samuel Martires, Noel Tijam, Andres Reyes, and Alexander Gesmundo — voted against De Lima's petition to nullify the warrant of arrest issued by the Muntinlupa City Regional Trial Court Branch 204 last February.

Leonen and five other justices — Chief Justice Maria Lourdes Sereno, Antonio Carpio, Estela Perlas Bernabe, Francis Jardeleza, and Alfredo Benjamin Caguioa — voted in favor of the petition.


Leonen said the majority decision reflected a failure of the prevalence of good justice.

“With due respect, it unsettles established doctrine, misapplies unrelated canons, and most importantly, fails to render a good judgement: law deployed with sound reasons taking the full context of the case as presented,” he added.

Leonen also described the case of De Lima as “quintessentially the use of the strong arm of the law to silence dissent.”

De Lima is a staunch critic of President Rodrigo Duterte, and the case against her would have been “simple and ordinary” had her reaction been different, wrote Leonen.

“She drew attention to many things she found wrong. She had been the subject of the colorful ire of the President of the Republic of the Philippines and his allies,” he added.

Leonen faulted Judge Juanita Guerrero of the Muntinlupa City Regional Trial Court Branch 204, saying she abused her discretion when she issued the arrest warrant without "personally examining" the witnesses, who, the magistrate pointed out, were high-profile convicts at the New Bilibid Prison.

"It would have been reasonable for a competent and independent judge to call the witnesses to test their credibility. Clearly, the life of convicts can be made difficult or comfortable by any present administration," said Leonen.

He said that the issuance of the arrest warrant against the senator was arbitrary and unconstitutional.

De Lima was the subject of a House committee on justice inquiry in 2016, where private details of her life were made public as she was accused of receiving bribes out of the proceeds of the drug trade involving the convicts. The bribes, it was alleged, funded her senatorial bid in 2016.

This, too, Leonen pointed out in his dissenting opinion.

“To me, what happened in this case is clear enough. The motives are not disguised,” he wrote.

Caguioa made a similar statement in his dissenting opinion, slamming the majority position when he outlined how the events in De Lima’s case played out.

“The message is clear and unmistakable: Arrest first; resolve the motion to quash and amend the Information later; then proceed to trial; finally, acquit after ten years or so,” he wrote, slamming the majority position that he said disregarded an accused’s right to due process.

‘Grossest injustices ever’

Carpio, meanwhile, said keeping De Lima in detention given the allegations against her is “one of the grossest injustices ever perpetrated in recent memory in full view of the Filipino nation and the entire world."

Carpio, like most of the judges who defended De Lima’s petition, argued that the information filed against De Lima did not correspond to the crimes of illegal drug sale and trade.

He said the case against De Lima was defective and that it failed to allege “any element” of the crime of illegal drug sale or trade.

“There was no specified seller, no specified buyer, no specified kind of dangerous drug, no specified quantity of dangerous drugs, no specified consideration, no specified delivery and no specified payment,” he wrote.

He said that all the presented information alleged was the use of cellular phones, which he said is not an element to the crime De Lima is accused of.

This defect in the information “is so patent that it cannot ever be cured,” Carpio wrote. Given this information, Carpio said the accusation of illegal drug trade is “blatantly a pure invention.”

In his dissenting opinion, Caguioa also called out the “glaring defects” in the allegations hurled against the former Secretary of Justice. This case, he said, is the “only” criminal case that alleges drug trade merely by the use of the phrase “dangerous drugs,” with no corpus delicti, or telling evidence, the smoking gun.

Cases like De Lima’s, Caguioa said, will lead to “an endless string of prosecutions,” where entire cases will rest on the mere allegation that a person has sold or traded dangerous drugs.

The allegations against De Lima, he said, are “fatally defective.”

Jurisdiction

Meanwhile, Sereno wrote in her dissenting opinion that the “Sandiganbayan has exclusive jurisdiction” over De Lima’s case, since the crime she is being accused of could not have been perpetrated had she not been holding public office.

The five other dissenting justices also maintained that the Sandiganbayan, a body tasked by the Constitution to hold public officials accountable, has jurisdiction over De Lima’s case.

“On the narrow ground of lack of jurisdiction over the offense charged, however, the balance tilts in the favor of the accused,” Jardeleza wrote in his dissenting opinion.

Bernabe, for her part, said “Tested against the standards set by jurisprudence, petitioner evidently stands charged of an offense which she allegedly committed in relation to her office,” which means De Lima’s case should be heard at the Sandiganbayan.

Bernabe, like the other five justices, maintained that the Muntinlupa City trial court has a “fundamental lack of authority” over De Lima’s case.

The Sandiganbayan is mandated by the Constitution to hold public officials accountable. It is also known as the anti-graft court. —ALG/MDM, GMA News

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