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Second, several of the articles of impeachment rest on pure questions of law that will not rise or fall on the basis of evidentiary tests. Was Renato Corona a midnight Chief Justice? To imply that all must be considered under a standard of evidence obscures the key questions that demand little evidence, only a judgment as to law. Just to show you how useless the criminal versus administrative debate is, let me ask you: Does one need to feel betrayed beyond a reasonable doubt? Its simply absurd to talk about the breach of public trust in this context. Third, the big debate doesnt determine the appreciation of the evidence. It cant tell us what truth the senator-judges will read from the evidence. How much evidence establishes truth beyond a reasonable doubt, that is to say, with moral certainty about the truth or falsity of an allegation? Every senator-judge will have his or her own threshold of moral certainty. Some are easily convinced, others not. Some are instinctively distrustful (diskumpyado), others more sanguine and unsuspecting. In other words, we repose too much trust in the power of words to confine and cabin what is essentially the intuitive judgment of human beings. At a more theoretical level, that in fact was the central insight of Holmes Legal Realism: Certainty is an illusion and repose is not the destiny of man. Finally, contrast the questioning by the parties counsels and that by the non-lawyer senators. In addition to Senator Honasans which I had earlier discussed, recall how Sen. Ralph Recto grilled Bureau of Internal Revenue chief Kim Henares. Until then, for over an hour, the private prosecutor wasted everybodys time on a detailed questioning to prove facts already admitted by the defense (and for which further proof was utterly superfluous), or about points on which Henares couldnt conceivably testify (beyond her competence). Yet it was Senator Recto who elicited from Henares not just the key facts so that Coronas tax returns could be examined by the Senate, but likewise the nuance that Corona might have made tax payments not reflected in the BIR records. It is time to do what the Senate and the opposing camps should have done at the outset: sit down and hold the equivalent of a pre-trial to streamline the flow of the trial. Mercifully but not surprisingly, it was Santiago who has come to the rescue, and called on both parties to put their cards on the table for all to see. Had this been done sooner, we could have precluded the pathetic scene last week, when the prosecution wanted to open the trial with the second article of impeachment (corruption) while the defense had its guns ready to defend on the first (midnight Chief Justice). We could have saved ourselves that excruciating hour-wait for Coronas tax returns, in the first place uncontested by opposing counsel. We could have saved ourselves the exasperation of watching documents marked in evidence, akin to watching grass grow. For the lawyers, the ultimate fact is that it is the Filipino people whom they are wooing. That is apparently lost on some prosecution counsels who act like being boring is actually a seduction strategy.
http://opinion.inquirer.net/21847/the-lawyers-ultimate-fac