Purisima nephew forged documents

Fourteen justices of the Supreme Court declared yesterday the nephew of one of their associates as "unfit" to become a lawyer for falsifying documents.

In a two-page en banc re-solution, the justices found that Mark Anthony Purisima, nephew of controversial Justice Fidel Purisima, forged a document to prove that he took a pre-Bar review course in a law school.

The younger Purisima actually passed the Bar after taking the exams for the fourth time last year.

However, he was disqualified when he failed to submit a certification that he took a pre-Bar review course.

The aspirant then showed proof that he took such a course at the Philippine Law School.

When the Supreme Court checked Purisima's claim, the law school wrote that it never offered a pre-Bar review course for the past 33 years.

"He (Purisima) made it appear in his petition that he was enrolled in the pre-Bar review course at the PLS when he filed his petition on 19 July 1999. But, as Dean Tomas Maddela Jr. through (the school's) acting registrar Rosalia Kapunan certified, PLS has never offered a pre-Bar review course since 1967," the High Court said.

The High Tribunal also made it clear that the disqualification of the 32-year-old Purisima and three other Bar candidates -- Josenilo Reoma, Ma. Salvacion Revilla and Victor Tesorero -- was without prejudice to the filing of criminal charges against them.

"This is without prejudice to whatever further action the Court may take against any of subject examinees/petitioners for perjury or falsification of public document as the facts may warrant," the SC warned.

The SC, meanwhile, has yet to decide on the fate of Purisima's uncle.

Former Senate President Jovito Salonga, former Justice Minister Sedfrey Ordoñez and the Integrated Bar of the Philippines urged the SC earlier to conduct a probe on Purisima's alleged improprieties and come up with credible findings on what really were the circumstances behind the 1999 Bar committee mess.

"To clear the air and... know the whole truth, instead of piecemeal revelations of the truth, may we respectfully suggest that the committee under the leadership of former Justice Ameurfina Melencio-Herrera be authorized by the Court to conduct a prompt, independent and thorough investigation," they wrote Chief Justice Hilario Davide Jr.

The legal luminaries said that an independent probe was necessary as Purisima himself had refused to step down, adding that "all sorts of speculations and innuendoes are now rife, in the absence of a credible account of what actually happened in the handling of the 1999 bar examinations."

Among the bases they cited for the probe were Purisima's admission that his nephew took the exams and his admission that he leaked the results of the SC's voting on the behest loans to Ombudsman Aniano Desierto.

The other cases cited against Purisima were his "insistence to fast-track" and handle the jai alai case as well as his draft decision on the National Telecommunications Commission case, which "found its way into the PLDT offices, signed by Purisima but not signed by the other justices."

"Because of their far-reaching implications and consequences, these new revelations, in our view, should have been more than enough to warrant an independent, impartial and thorough investigation. They have been published in the papers and have not been denied, as far as we know," they said in a three-page letter.

In a related development yesterday, several law students who flunked the Bar have petitioned the SC to persuade Justice Purisima to resign.

"If Justice Purisima has still a sense of delicadeza left, he should resign immediately to save his peers from the pernicious effects of his indiscretion in connection with the 1999 Bar examinations," the students said in a statement.

The same students also asked the High Court to do away with the so-called disqualification rule.

The rule states that any Bar examinee who gets a grade below 50 in any Bar subject, even if he gets a weighted average of 75, is disqualified and is considered failed.

The students said this rule is "unfair and discriminatory" because of the "human factor involved in the correction of the test booklets of more than 3,000 per Bar subject."