Erap lawyers want Clarissa testimony nullified

Lawyers of deposed President Joseph Estrada asked the Sandiganbayan yesterday to nullify the testimonies of prosecution star witness Clarissa Ocampo and a bank lawyer on the ground that these were unlawfully obtained by government prosecutors.

In a six-page motion, lead defense counsel Rene Saguisag urged the justices of the special division to strike out the testimony of Ocampo and Manuel Curato, both of Equitable PCI Bank, who had declared during the former president’s impeachment trial that Estrada and the user of the bank alias Jose Velarde were one and the same.

Saguisag said the testimonies should be stricken because the witnesses had volunteered the information.

He said these were "illegally extracted" since Ocampo and Curato testified in the December 2000 impeachment trial of Estrada without the benefit of any subpoena from the Senate, which constituted itself as an impeachment court to try Estrada’s cases of alleged massive corruption.

Prosecutors have said the two witnesses are "vital" to their case because they both positively identified Estrada as the person who signed as Jose Velarde on numerous bank forms.

According to Saguisag, by volunteering information on the Jose Velarde account without permission of its owner, these testimonies should be thrown out or "suppressed" by the anti-graft court for being "fruits of the poisoned tree."

"Since the original sin was committed in the impeachment court, it is not washed away by reintroducing evidence here (Sandiganbayan) that could not have been lawfully considered in the aborted impeachment trial," Saguisag wrote in his motion.