Moment of truth

WHEN HE comes on Tuesday (May 22) Chief Justice Renato Corona will be appearing at his own impeachment trial for the first time. He did come on its opening day, on Jan. 16, but sat in the privilege boxes, looking more like one of the famous in the gallery than the infamous accused himself.

In fact he has since been conducting his own forums, mostly in the front yard of the Supreme Court, the latest one held Thursday (May 17) with his wife, Cristina, cheerleading. These have been forums predisposed not just to take him at his mere word but to applaud him.

At the Senate, in the meantime, his trial has gone on to unfold evidence after evidence of real property and bank accounts collected in suspicious, if not downright anomalous, ways and amounts. The latest and, at least on their face, most damning revelations have been those of 82 foreign-currency accounts through which more than $12 million (more than PhP500 million) has moved in more than 700 transactions.

These are the things Corona will have to confront himself—on the stand. And when he does, an event widely doubted happening until his counsels fixed a date for it, he will get no help from his claque, who, for all its noise and number, makes up a mere part of the mere 25 percent who want him acquitted, as against the 73 percent who think him guilty, going by the latest poll. In court, there will be just him and his counsels, his accusers, a gallery bound on pain of expulsion by a rule of silence, and 23 senator-judges, of whom at least 16 he has to sway to his side.

But just how does he do it—indeed, how can he do it? By no other way than proving all evidence brought against him to be “a lantern of lies” (to use his own icky phrase), which further means proving the likes of Ombudsman Conchita Carpio Morales, who herself testified on his dollar accounts, and the Anti-Money Laundering Council, which had supplied her her documents, to have been mistaken, if not lying as well.

Morales’s testimony proved so explosive it not only rendered unnecessary—though allowed all the same—the next-scheduled testimonies by the complainants that had set her off on her inquiry, but also provoked Corona’s promised appearance. The testimony in fact took two days of hearings; it featured a PowerPoint presentation of numbered mother and satellite accounts and active dollar inflows and outflows through them.

Obviously Corona’s mere word will not be good enough this time; a definitive showing will be required that no such accounts or transactions have ever existed, which in turn will require him telling the banks, Show ‘em.

Before things heated up for him, Corona had often mockingly challenged the state to keep whatever wealth of his found undeclared—something needless to say though effective perhaps in displaying bravado. The chain of consequences arising from guilt in fact doesn’t end there; it proceeds to dishonourable discharge, then to criminal trial, and finally, if the finding of guilt is sustained, to jail.

But since the chain starts with a process in which justice is dispensed by politicians, compromises could conceivably color it. A senator-judge has only to find Corona’s innocence or guilt expedient to make him or her vote whichever way. In that case, the relevant number for the court to consider as it hedges its bets is the 46 percent willing to go to the streets to exact ultimate justice. That number definitely constitutes a critical mass.

The trial, at any rate, has reached its moment of truth for everyone—for Corona, for the court, for the people.