Justice with a heart

Some members of the Integrated Bar of the Philippines have come up with a list of top 10 candidates for the position of Chief Justice. In a day or two, I suppose it will whittle the number to three. The list is from a “mock vote” conducted among individual members of the national organization of lawyers, and is not taken to mean the IBP’s official vote.

Not surprisingly, it does not include Justice Secretary Leila de Lima, who is facing administrative complaints against her and disbarment complaints filed by lawyers for her utterances against former Chief Justice Renato Corona, calling him “lawless tyrant,” and for her alleged defiance of the SC’s temporary restraining order on a travel ban against former President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, who was then asking permission to leave the country to seek medical treatment for a degenerative bone condition.

The mock vote listed as top ten nominees Associate Justice Roberto Abad, Associate Justice Lourdes Sereno, Associate Justice Arturo Brion, former University of the Philippines law dean Raul Pangalangan, Associate Justice Teresita de Castro, Acting Chief Justice Antonio Carpio, Presidential Commission on Good Government Chair Andres Bautista, Solicitor General Francis Jardeleza, Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Teresita Herbosa and former Representative Ronaldo Zamora.

The non-inclusion of De Lima in the IBP’s mock vote seems to be of no importance to followers of De Lima, who, they believe, is the choice of President P-Noy for the position. De Lima herself has been quoted as saying she is close to the President.

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A non-follower of De Lima who lives in Dumaguete City wrote me, saying, “I’d like to tell you that several of us informed and intelligent promdis here are disappointed that De Lima didn’t turn down her nomination. We’re sure we are not alone. It seems that she changed her mind after that long talk with the President. Where is her vaunted independence of mind? Is this a case of ‘My President right or wrong?’

Where has delicadeza gone? De Lima shouldn’t give her and P-Noy’s critics more ammunition. These enemies have trumpeted their suspicion all along that the President encouraged the impeachment of Corona so that he could appoint his own CJ who would be totally indebted to him and subservient to his will, exactly the same criticism P-Noy & Co. leveled against GMA and Corona. Some reek of hypocrisy. The President’s motives should be beyond suspicion. De Lima shouldn’t contribute to their wrong perception.         

“While we can understand that, ideally, a President should be able to trust the head of the Judiciary branch, and even though we were no admirers of Corona, whether we like it or not, his ouster raised some serious questions because it was the President himself who engineered his ouster.

“We were great admirers of De Lima at the beginning, but her latest decisions, and especially her unseemly (embarrassing even) openly grasping desire to become the next Chief Justice, have tarnished her image in our eyes.”

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The Judicial and Bar Council members’ oral interviews of nominees to the post of Chief Justice revealed the capacity of contenders to lead the highest judicial post. To be sure the nominees who had been interviewed were all bright and expressed what they would like to do once appointed. The main difference was in their ability to express themselves in clear, dramatic language. Associate Justice Lourdes Sereno was good at articulating her ideas in English and Pilipino. Many of my friends told me Comelec Commissioner Rene Sarmiento’s experience as a human rights lawyer and peacekeeper will serve him well as a dispenser of justice. And I applauded lawyer Katrina Legarda for speaking clearly, without hesitancy, without groping for words, about her passionate defense of women victims of injustice.

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A regular reader of this column expressed his view that former Congressman Ronaldo Zamora showed his soft side during his interview by the JBC when he was asked how he has coped with the loss of his daughter to leukemia years back.

“The loss of a child is always painful to parents and it showed when Zamora, close to tears and taking some time to compose himself, answered — his voice breaking — that it had been a difficult, day-to-day process.

 “But instead of sulking following the demise of his daughter who chose to pass on peacefully by signing a do-not-revive (DNR) request, Zamora said he chose to help in the fight against that virulent, almost-always fatal form of leukemia.”

When detected early in its stages, acute myelogenous leukemia (AML) is still treatable, thus Zamora said he put up a foundation in memory of his daughter to help treat children afflicted with AML.

Another observer wrote me to say that as one of the candidates for the post of chief justice, he believes Zamora delivered his message loud and clear (for most part in the Filipino language whose use he advocates in court hearings) that justice must be humane or in his own word, “restorative.”

“I think if Zamora becomes CJ, we would have a justice system that is firm against recidivist criminals (those who must perpetually be kept under lock and key to shield society from them) but which has a heart for those who can still be rehabilitated,” my reader wrote.

“Ang katotohanan, ang mahalaga sa (the truth, what’s important in) restorative justice is that you’re not out to punish a wrongdoer but you want to restore his rightful place in society. You want to restore a community to where it was prior to the commission of the crime, said Zamora.”

Viewing Zamora’s interview on television, I noted Zamora’s pushing for technical innovations in the dispensation of justice in the Philippines, like providing justices and judges access to electronic copies of laws and jurisprudence through such devices as iPads, etc. He pointed out that many tech-savvy lawyers nowadays do not need legal researchers anymore or have very little need to consult ink-and-paper versions of law reference materials because they can access the same through computers. If justice and judges have access to high-tech research technology, you can imagine the substantial diminution of a huge backlog of cases. 

As confirmed by JBC chair and SC Associate Justice Diosdado Peralta, Zamora has a track record in pushing for a more realistic budget for the judiciary, like when he moved for a bigger share for the judiciary in the national budget during congressional deliberations.

In increasing the judiciary’s budget, Zamora’s 30 years of experience as a seven-term lawmaker dating back to the unicameral Batasang Pambansa and his stint as Executive Secretary could come into play should he head the judiciary.

Another thing Zamora said at one point in the interview: “Give the poor more in law because he has less in life. The law is not the plaything of the rich. It is meant to be accessible to anyone.”

From where I sit, I think Zamora has in mind those who are now languishing in jail despite being innocent because they were unable to afford good lawyers who would have proven their cases. Sadly, many of the lawyers provided by the state to the poor either lack the passion or are too inept to do a proper job.

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