A substantive first week of the impeachment trial

The nation is currently glued to the Senate impeachment trial of Vice President Sara Duterte. While an impeachment trial is ‘sui generis’ (a class of its own) and should not be conducted like an ordinary court proceeding steeped in legalese and technicalities, as some commentators argue, it cannot be avoided that the discipline and technicalities of law will inevitably apply.

After all, while most senator-judges are not lawyers, the prosecution and defense panels are composed of lawyers. The task, therefore, is to explain the process and the issues in a way that the people can understand.

Day 2 of the trial saw Atty. Amando Virgil Ligutan doing the direct examination of the first witness for the prosecution. His Senate courtroom presence was calm, focused, and quietly commanding --the kind of methodical advocacy that people in Cebu, where he earned his undergraduate degree and now practices law, and in Leyte, where he grew up, can be very proud of.

It feels like only yesterday. In 2009, on the evening after the last Sunday of the Bar exams in Manila, we were piled into the back of a pickup truck with our common Bisaya friends, sprawled on the floor of the truck’s metal bed, catching the breeze and taking in the Manila nightlife after more than a month of fighting our way through the four Sundays of the Bar. Today, Cebu is such a small place that we often run into each other in familiar circles and events where our common advocacies meet.

With that said, let me return to the task of explaining the process and the issues by looking at what transpired during the trial this week. The prosecution presented its initial evidence under Article IV of the impeachment complaint, which alleges that the vice president’s acts betrayed public trust, culpably violated the Constitution, and constituted other high crimes through a public admission made on live broadcast.

That alleged admission came from a livestreamed press conference in 2024, where Vice President Duterte said she had instructed someone to kill the president, the first lady, and the speaker of the House if she herself were killed.

The first witness, NBI Senior Agent John Mark Calilung, testified mainly on the open-source review of the vice president’s public statements. Senator Risa Hontiveros then observed that none of the statements proved the vice president had actually contracted an assassin, and asked why they were impeachable at all. The prosecution conceded that the statements alone may not be proof that the vice president actually contracted a killer, and that, at this point, the prosecution was still proving intent or state of mind. The alleged high crime of contracting an assassin, therefore, remains unproven at the moment.

However, prosecution counsel Atty. Ligutan pointed out that the threats still support the charge of betrayal of public trust or that the vice president culpably violated the Constitution. Responding directly to the questions raised --and this was one of Atty. Ligutan’s moments of brilliance-- he shifted the discussion back to the broader constitutional question at the heart of impeachment by asking: “Mga kababayan, kailan ba naging normal… Kailan ba nangyari sa kasaysayan ng Republika ng Pilipinas na ‘yung pangalawang pangulo ng ating bansa, nagbanta, sinabi sa publiko na nakipagkontrata na siya sa isang mamamatay-tao upang patayin ang pangulo, ang first lady --‘yung asawa niya?”

Even without first resolving whether the statement constituted a criminal offense, such a public threat by the vice president, in the prosecution’s view, was already enough to show a betrayal of the public trust reposed in her by the electorate.

Then Senator Pia Cayetano stood up and took issue with Senator Hontiveros’s questions, saying that they had opened the door for Ligutan to make what sounded like a premature closing statement. Hontiveros clarified that she was merely probing the materiality of the evidence to the allegations in the Articles of Impeachment.

Ligutan’s reply to the probe was a basic Rules of Evidence submission. The proponent of evidence must specify the purpose for which the evidence is being offered. One cannot ask counsel how his evidence connects to the articles and, at the same time, forbid him from stating that connection. Explaining why evidence is material or relevant during the trial is not the same as making a closing argument. It is necessary so the senator-judges can decide whether the evidence should be admitted in the first place.