SC ignored Miriam's contempt before

“I am not angry. I am irate. I am foaming in the mouth. I am homicidal. I am suicidal. I am humiliated, debased, degraded. And I am not only that, I feel like throwing up to be living my middle years in a country of this nature. I am nauseated. I spit on the face of Chief Justice x x x and his cohorts in the Supreme Court, I am no longer interested in the position [of Chief Justice] if I was to be surrounded by idiots. I would rather be in another environment but not in the Supreme Court of idiots.”

Sen. Miriam Defensor Santiago uttered those words in a privilege speech in 2006. A lawyer filed before the SC a case for disbarment and other disciplinary actions, for disrespect to the justices and direct contempt. Four months later Santiago countered the complaint by citing parliamentary immunity. Supposed she was then mulling legislation on the Judicial and Bar Council.

The case landed in the SC 3rd division. Justice Minita Chico-Nazario (since retired) was acting chairwoman, with Justices Conchita Carpio-Morales, Presbitero Velasco, Antonio Eduardo Nachura and Diosdado Peralta as members.

In his ponencia of August 2009, Velasco said Santiago’s claim of remedial legislation on the JBC struck them as mere afterthought. “Her statements were expressions of personal anger and frustration at not being considered for the post of Chief Justice,” the ponente noted. “In a sense, therefore, her remarks were outside the pale of her official parliamentary functions. Even parliamentary immunity must not be allowed to be used as a vehicle to ridicule, demean, and destroy the reputation of the Court and its magistrates, nor as armor for personal wrath and disgust.”

Velasco reiterated the duty of the bench and bar to protect the judiciary’s reputation, and of Congress to punish un-parliamentary acts and language. “We would be remiss in our duty if we let the Senator’s offensive and disrespectful language that definitely tended to denigrate the institution pass,” he wrote.

The feisty senator was gonna get it from the SC. (See www.lawphil.net/judjuris/juri2009/aug2009/ac_7399_2009. html)

But the dispositive portion was anticlimactic: “Wherefore, the letter-complaint of Antero J. Pobre against Senator/Atty. Santiago is, conformably to Art. VI, Sec. 11 of the Constitution, dismissed.”

Individual and collective restraint was obvious in the division’s unanimous decision.

This month the SC en banc cleared one of its members of a plagiarism rap. Majority saw no malice in Justice Mariano del Castillo lifting portions of international studies and articles on World War II comfort women, without attribution to the authors and for use contrary to their opinions. The same majority then ordered 37 UP law faculty members to show cause why they shouldn’t be punished for indirect contempt in calling for del Castillo’s resignation upon newsbreak of the alleged offense.

Velasco, Nachura and Peralta concurred with the majority, along with CJ Renato Corona, and Justices Teresita Leonardo-de Castro, Arturo Brion, Lucas Bersamin, Martin Villarama, Jose Perez, and Jose Mendoza. Upholding the constitutional guarantee of academic freedom, Carpio-Morales dissented, along with Justices Antonio Carpio and Maria Lourdes Aranal-Sereno. (See Gotcha, 25 Oct. 2010, “Pattern Shows in SC Rulings”)

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Those frequent airline cut-fares are sure to land you one of these days at the Bacolod-Silay Airport in Negros Occidental. Grab the chance to visit Silay’s 26 well-kept ancestral houses and take in the city’s fascinating story (www.dakbanwang silay.com, tourism office e-mail silaycity_ [email protected], landline 034-4955 553). Silay used to host the Orient’s longest seaport — all of 15 kilometers — that made it a favorite of European and American vessels. The sugar barons of the 1870s to the 1930s imported the finest construction materials, furniture, vehicles, artworks, musical instruments, linen, silverware, clothes and jewelry from makers on the other side of the globe. And these were preserved in the old houses due to the Silaynons’ strong sense of heritage and a stroke of luck.

In 1945 as the US liberation forces were advancing, Lt. Junichiro Doi of the Japanese Imperial Air Force was ordered to bomb the San Diego Church in Silay’s poblacion. The officer found inside the century-old structure only civilians, some of whom he had befriended during the years of turmoil. An admirer of historical structures in his homeland, Doi defied the order and instead joined his retreating troops. Had he blasted the church, he would have destroyed the surrounding old houses as well.

Doi ended up in the forests of Mount Patag, facing the sea, with 11,000 Occupation soldiers, for a last stand. US naval vessels shelled them for days before a ground assault. After the war a huge logging firm bagged the Mount Patag concession. But the trees couldn’t be cut; the chainsaws would conk out every time the workers hit metal chunks embedded in the trunks; shrapnel from the shelling thus preserved the forest.

In adjoining Talisay City are The Ruins of another ancestral manor — of the Lacson-Braga family. Built in 1920, it used to be the biggest in the area, surrounded by hundreds of hectares of Don Mariano Lacson’s sugar hacienda. In 1942 Filipino guerrillas burned it down to prevent the Japanese from using it as headquarters. Eyewitnesses say it took three days to raze. Mariano’s great-grandson Raymond Javellana “rediscovered” the remains of the mansion, and turned it into a museum with al fresco bistro and party garden. Raymond is there most of the time; if he’s not busy fixing things up, he’ll take you around the place himself (www.theruins.com.ph., e-mail [email protected], mobile 0917-8326003, landline 034-4764334).

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 “‘I was hungry and you fed me’ contains in seed the whole Christian message.” Shafts of Light, Fr. Guido Arguelles, SJ

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E-mail: [email protected].