'Plagiarism raps against Supreme Court magistrate lacked merit'

MANILA, Philippines - The Supreme Court (SC) said yesterday it deplores the House committee on justice’s finding substance in the impeachment complaint against Justice Mariano del Castillo over allegations of plagiarism.

SC spokesman Midas Marquez said the high tribunal already ruled in October last year that the allegations of plagiarism, twisting of cited materials, and gross neglect against the magistrate lacked merit.

“It’s unfortunate that they seemed not to have taken consideration of that decision by the court,” he told a press conference.

Still, Marquez stressed Del Castillo is ready to answer the complaint filed by University of the Philippines lawyer Harry Roque Jr.

“I understand the justice will be given 10 days to comment from the time he receives that finding so we’ll see how the justice will respond to that,” Marquez explained.

The SC official also stressed that the decision of the House committee should be respected.

“It may be a political decision, so we leave that to the members of the House of Representatives,” he pointed out.

Marquez added that the high court would not speculate on whether there was something in the timing of the voting of the committee. The committee made the vote two days after President Aquino publicly assailed the judiciary.

Asked to comment on calls for the impeachment of Chief Justice Renato Corona, the SC spokesman replied: ”I don’t know what the grounds will be. We have the grounds listed in the rules, and I can’t think of any possible ground whoever will be filing will try to invoke.”

“The mistake of Justice Del Castillo’s researcher is that, after the justice had decided what texts, passages and citations were to be retained including those from (authors), and when she was already cleaning up her work and deleting all subject tags, she unintentionally deleted the footnotes that went with such tags – with disastrous effect,” the SC ruling on Del Castillo’s case read.

“On occasion judges and justices have mistakenly cited the wrong sources, failed to use quotation marks, inadvertently omitted necessary information from footnotes or endnotes. But these do not, in every case, amount to misconduct. Only errors that are tainted with fraud, corruption or malice are subject of disciplinary action,” it stressed.