THE TWO COURTS ON PLUNDER CASES By Philip M. Lustre Jr. Published in the Philippine Catholic Veritas June 1-15 , 2014 issue Senators Bong Revilla, Jinggoy Estrada and Juan Ponce Enrile, their co-accused, and allies have the right to stop the people from calling them plunderers. The Sandiganbayan is to start its full blown public hearings on the plunder charges lodged against them. They have yet to face conviction of the alleged crimes imputed on them. This urgent call is not new. It has been raised in previous plunder and corruption charges against ranking state officials. But the three senators and their ilk possess the legal ground to make that appeal in the absence of any official court verdict. The court of law, or the Sandiganbayan, has assumed jurisdiction and control over the plunder charges against them in June after months of study and evaluation by the Office of the Ombudsman. The Office of the Ombudsman has to organize the volumes of evidence it possesses before it had filed the plunder charges against Revilla, Estrada, and Enrile and their cohorts. The hearing of their cases started in late June, when Revilla and his co-accused faced the arraignment proceedings. They have entered the plea of “not guilty.” Henceforth, a protracted legal battle is to ensue as the three senators and their ilk are to attempt to prove their innocence on the plunder charges. Their retinue of highly paid lawyers, or “abogados de campanilla,” as they are called in the circles of the rich and not so rich, are expected to draw varying legal strategies from their bags of tricks to ensure the acquittal of their high profile clients. DIFFERENT DYNAMICS But not everything depends on the court of law. The court of public opinion exists side by side with the court of law. Their coexistence is however not mutually exclusive, as each court draws inputs from each other. In many instances, the court of law is influenced by the other court, or vice versa, although neither court would admit it. The two courts are different in practically all counts. They have different dynamics. The court of law is characterized by its rigid structures and rules, all defined by the strictures of the law. The judge sits in the middle of the courtroom and presides over formal hearings, which could be made public or private depending on his judgement. Dressed in his elegant robe, the judge listens to the two contending parties, the prosecution and the defense, as they perform legal skirmishes. Broadly, the prosecution panel works to prove the guilt of the accused by showing available pieces of evidence and initiate testimonies by key witnesses to warrant punishment for the accused, who has allegedly committed crime. On its shoulder lies the burden of proof. The defense panel does the opposite, as it disproves the allegations against the accused. After the two sides have presented their respective arguments, the judge renders a decision. It could side with either party. The rigidity of the legal processes leads to prolonged legal battles to the exhaustion of the contending parties. It is normal to see legal battles lasting for years – or decades. After the judge has rendered his decision, either party could lodge an appeal before the appellate court, prolonging the legal battle. Or it could raise another appeal to the highest court – the Supreme Court - when the decision of the appellate court did not satisfy either party. SPONTANEITY AND LOOSE STRUCTURE The court of public opinion operates very differently from the court of law. It is characterized by its spontaneity and loose structure. It is dominated by the mass media, which dishes out every conceivable detail about a particular issue to inform the people. Unlike the court of law, which has a presiding judge and two main protagonists, the judges in the court of public opinion are no less than the multitudes of anonymous and faceless people, who painstakingly watch issues of national or global significance. In some ways, the mass media too becomes the judge of sort, when it renders it own judgment. The two courts differ on the nature of punishment they impose. When a court of law renders a judgment and punishes an accused, the entire judicial system could be expected to follow the decision. When it rules that an accused is guilty of the alleged crime, the judge punishes him by imposing fines, or a jail term – all on the basis of the letters of the law. A jail term is a jail term; the accused is expected to enter the prison and suffer for a specific period. The court of public opinion does not provide a jail term for the main and minor characters involved in an issue of public interest. It has no power to do it; it derives its power on moral suasion. But when the court of public opinion renders its judgment, the cacophony of boos from ordinary citizens could be immediately felt and seen. Moreover, the public ostracism of these characters follows. Social isolation becomes the usual consequence; they become pariahs. They are treated as social outcasts. They hardly become part of mainstream society. In short, the court of public opinion could be very powerful too just like the court of law. Anything that goes into the process only the court of public opinion possesses could become the talk of the town, where moral sanctions become the usual recourse. In many instances, topics of public interest that undergo legal processes and litigation in a court of law are equally put under the public scalpel in the court of public opinion. THE PLUNDER CHARGES Senators Juan Ponce Enrile, Bong Revilla, and Jinggoy Estrada face enormous difficulties on the issue of their alleged involvement in the P10-billion pork barrel scam mainly because of the growing public perception that they were indeed deeply involved in the scandal. In most opinions aired and published by traditional and nontraditional media, the public seems to have reached the verdict about their alleged involvement because of their inability to explain fully the details surrounding their share of the Priority Development Assistance Fund, the lawmakers’ pork barrel funds. What did they do to the more than P600 million in PDAF which each of the three lawmakers received in 2007, 2008, and 2009? What happened to the money? Where did they place them? Which organizations or agencies – public or private – received them? How much did each organization or agency received? Who were the beneficiaries of the state funds, which were supposed to go to their pet projects? These are among the questions that keep on cropping out. Yet, the lawmakers have yet to address them. Moreover, they could not answer the special audit reports the Commission on Audit had completed to show their misuse of their pork barrel funds. They could not rebuff the statements of whistleblower Benhur Luy, which have named them as the main beneficiaries of the pork barrel scandal. Instead, they have embarked on every conceivable strategy to lessen the public pressures on the main suspects of the P10-billion pork barrel scam. They have launched their most vitriolic attacks and counteroffensive to gain the upper hand in the ongoing propaganda war to gain public sympathy. When everything seems to have failed, they have finally settled to just one last strategy: damage control. DAMAGE CONTROL The concept of damage control lies mainly on the premise that if everything is on the verge of losing, a proponent has no choice but to lessen the damage. In crisis management, damage control means the application of emergency controls to save whatever is left or salvageable. If a sinking ship would mean the loss of ten lives, how about reducing it to four or five? This is how this concept works. Employing damage control in the court of public opinion, the three lawmakers, through their mass media cohorts, did everything they could to project that they were victims, not culprits, in the biggest heist in the country’s political history. They launched initiatives to take off the heat from them by projecting that President Benigno Aquino III and his subordinates were equally as corrupt. They claimed the Disbursement Acceleration Program (DAP), which they erroneously propagated as the “presidential pork barrel,” was as corruption-tainted as PDAF, the lawmakers’ pork barrel fund. It failed dismally; it even backfired because they could not present solid proofs of their claims. They tried to create scandals within the scandal believing that if the pork barrel scandal would generate new details to create a new scandal, the public would lose focus on the main suspects and instead humiliate publicly the next line of suspects. But the court of public opinion is not biting. Its focus is still on the three lawmakers, who reputedly cornered the biggest amount of public funds by using the fake NGOs of Janet Napoles. They had experimented on the basic strategy to confuse the public by coming with different sets of lists. Alleged pork barrel mastermind Janet Napoles used several people including Ping Lacson and Sandra Cam to carry out this cheap shot. But again, it backfired. But it nonetheless showed what Napoles wanted to achieve. OTHER FORUMS Lately, Jinggoy Estrada and BongRevilla had used the Senate as a forum, delivering forgettable speeches. Carried live by media outfits, their speeches only triggered anger from the public, which did not hesitate to sneer at them. Again, they were dismal failures in generating public sympathy. They could not turn around the situation. The court of public opinion seems to be adversely working against them. They have been issuing statements left and right, denying to death their involvement. But the people’s reactions have been most discomfiting for them to say the least. They laugh at them, give cynical remarks, or crack jokes of tremendous humorous proportions, making the three senators a trio of laughing stocks. Before the court of public opinion, Revilla’s statement, “I love all Filipino people,” and Estrada’s “hindi po ako magnanakaw (I am not a thief)” have become staples for a never ending series of dinner laughter and comedy bar jokes. The same with their series of complaints and inane statements of their families, relatives, and lawyers, arising from the discomfort in their detention cells at the Philippine National Police (PNP) , including the alleged presence of rats and cockroaches there. MIDDLE GAME Their imprisonment at the PNP Detention Center in Camp Crame on the basis of plunder, a nonbailable offense, and subsequent arraignment at the Sandiganbayan would mean that the court of law would go on full throttle to determine their culpability or guilt in their alleged pocketing of millions of pesos in PDAF. If this were a game of chess, the court hearings would mean the entry to the middle game, where lawyers from the prosecution and defense would tangle in bitter legal skirmishes to get into the bottom of the case. Many things would happen. It would have it twists and turns; it could have some false starts, and dead ends. Mass media, the main instrument of the court of public opinion, would co-exist with the court of public law by bringing the blow by blow account of the court proceedings, allowing the public many glimpses of the legal process. Although the court of law will come with its final verdict in the end, the court of public opinion will continue to grind, giving the public the chance and leeway to make its judgment on the issue. The two courts will check each other. This is the process, the perpetual interplay of the two courts of varying persuasions and processes.
Posted on: Sun, 06 Jul 2014 09:46:09 +0000
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