[Newspoint] Lorna Kapunan for the people - Rappler

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But for the excitingly audacious performance of Lorna Kapunan, the impeachment trial of Vice President Sara Duterte has been little more than a rerun of the hearings that led the House of Representatives to impeach her and send her to trial in the Senate.

I watched those hearings religiously. They were riveting. It was there that the crimes imputed on Duterte — embezzlement of hundreds of millions of taxpayer pesos, among others — were solidified by evidence to such a degree that I thought they did not need further proving. Indeed, I thought a trial would be a mere formality, especially since the regular rigors of judicial adjudication don’t apply — no jail, no restitution, only sacking and a lifelong ban from holding public office.

Also, the accusations went virtually uncontested at the pre-impeachment investigation. Although lawyers were allowed to prompt all those called to it, and although a lawyer herself, Duterte refused to appear. Now at trial, with a battery of lawyers allowed to speak freely for her under more flexible arrangements, she has taken the opportunity only as an even more convenient excuse to be absent.

Anyway, with scarcely anything other than technical arguments to deploy, her lawyers have not been impressive. True, they have yet to present their case in her defense, but what possibly do they have in their arsenal that can turn things around? Lorna Kapunan knows and pushes forward.

Known through all her nearly half-century of practice as a terror at litigation, she looks in perfect form. She looks the part too, in command, as the most senior of the private counsels who have teamed up with members of the House prosecuting the case. And she now forces the issue. She is asking the impeachment court to summon Duterte and have her explain herself in person, in court, on national television and across all online platforms.

Duterte’s chief counsel is quick to come to her rescue and invoke, all too predictably, everyone’s constitutional right against being forced to give testimony that can be used to prove their own guilt. Wedged between a plundered nation and a suspect presumed, as a matter of course, to be inviolably in possession of one of the most basic individual rights, the court chooses to go easy with the latitude granted it by law, which, for one thing, leaves it to make its own rules and render unappealable decisions. Apparently thinking first of dispelling the storm of debate gathering over Kapunan’s motion, the court decides to shelve it.

All that rare excitement provided by Kapunan happened on the 23rd day of trial, when the court last convened, adjourning to reconvene after an unusually long six-day recess that ends today (September 14). But you can be sure Kapunan’s motion will continue to hang ominously over the heads of the senator judges until they realize they have to deal with it, and do so promptly, for their own credibility. Never mind that they have allowed the trial to grow tedious, but allowing Sara Duterte to go off accusing them of “bending the law” against her!

It was only days before Kapunan made her motion that she last made that accusation, and she did it with characteristic theatrics — the “drama queen,” as her own father had described her when once she went so far with her propensity to play victim as to state, publicly, that she herself had been raped.

With her fixtured herd of cheerleaders behind her, she stood outside the office of the regional trial court that had issued a warrant for her arrest on charges of grave threats. She had gone on social media to warn President Marcos, his wife, and his cousin Martin Romualdez, the Speaker at the time, that she had contracted an assassin to kill all three of them. In the end, she posted bail to buy herself provisional freedom, but not before she taunted the police to cuff her and put her behind bars. It would have made a great photo-op for her had the police not wised up to her antics.

In fact, any court or institution of law that attempts to exercise jurisdiction over her gets it. Not even the International Criminal Court has been spared. She accuses it of being “a puppet…a lapdog” of President Marcos, her family’s archenemy.

Her father, Rodrigo, has been in detention in The Hague, the Netherlands, awaiting trial before that court on charges of “crimes against humanity” for the thousands of deaths in the war on drugs during his presidency (2016-2022). Although not an accused herself, she is mentioned in affidavits of confessed assassins for Duterte as complicit in some of those extrajudicial killings.

That’s why the impeachment court cannot just bury Kapunan’s motion in its agenda on some procedural pretext. Her motion is no mere legal request; it constitutes a moral challenge to a court precisely given the singular power to put the likes of Sara Duterte in their place. – Rappler.com