Beginning at the end

When the prosecution opened its case against Vice President Sara Duterte, I found it interesting that it did not follow the original order of the articles of impeachment. It began at the end. Article IV—the threat against the life of the President, his wife, and the then Speaker of the House—was presented first. Captured on video in a moment of unguarded fury and replayed for the impeachment court, the Vice President’s rant was high drama. Good for ratings, as in any televised series. But I wondered if there was something to this as a courtroom strategy.

Of the four charges, the assassination threat is probably the most self-contained. It needs the least evidentiary scaffolding. There is a recording, an admission, and three named targets. The other charges—namely, the misuse of confidential funds, the bribery, the unexplained wealth—would entail the tedious presentation of ledgers, acknowledgment receipts, audit findings, bank records, etc. In short: the slow assembly of accumulated proof.

In contrast, the threat requires only that the tape be played. A seasoned trial lawyer opens with a video recording that instantly grabs attention, and builds from there toward the charges that take longer to establish. Seen this way, the order seems unassailable. It begins with an event that, at once, illustrates the thesis of unfitness for office, and proceeds toward the more prosaic presentation of documents.

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The prosecution’s purpose in opting to launch its case in this manner is not hard to read. It wants to establish, early and vividly, a portrait of a public official who is impulsive, intemperate, prone to violence, and highly capable of contemplating the unthinkable. From that summary depiction, the prosecution may then build, article by article, a fuller picture of someone who takes liberties with the law and thinks nothing about freely dispensing the public funds entrusted to her care. In short, here is a public official who is not merely noncompliant but indifferent to the norms that govern the conduct of public office. That order of presentation—assassination threat, then misused public funds, then bribery, then hidden and unexplained wealth—projects an ascending demonstration of unfitness. It is a crescendo composed for a courtroom.

But an impeachment court is not an ordinary court, and its decision, though final, is not the one that truly counts. Especially in this case, where the accused is a declared presidential aspirant. The senator-judges will render a verdict, but the public may render another. What convicts in law does not always convict in the public mind, and what plays powerfully before the court may play very differently before the electorate that is the final arbiter of a politician’s fate. We have seen this a lot of times, where electoral victories are made to wash away every prior conviction.

What the public that is watching a replay of that video at home may see can be different from what the prosecution intends to show. The prosecution may want to document a violent temperament unbefitting the holder of the nation’s second highest public office. But to a great many Filipinos, it could show something else: a woman wronged, striking back at the ally who betrayed her. That image would then not convey instability, but righteous resentment; not a provocation, but a warning against further abuse.

Such a reading confirms the narrative that has kept Duterte afloat since the breakup of the Marcos-Duterte “UniTeam”: the wounded victim of betrayal, the heir apparent who accepted the second slot in 2022, the daughter whose father was sent to prison abroad, now pursued by those who fear her at the polls. Played on live television, Article IV scores its legal point, but, in the same instant, it refreshes the very myth that sustains the accused in the popular consciousness.

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This order of presentation conceals a real risk. The charge that can actually clinch the prosecution’s thesis, readable both from a legal and layperson’s perspective, is the last the prosecution will present. The unexplained wealth, manifestly disproportionate to any honest earning, is the one accusation that strikes at what public trust may mean to the ordinary citizen. We are talking here of something immediately graspable: whether a public servant is what she claims to be, whether the modest life projected is real or performed. That question can be answered by the bank records that the impeachment court can now summon, and by little else. It is the heaviest of all the charges. And it sits at the bottom of the impeachment articles, to be presented only after the long proceedings shall have tested everyone’s patience.

The order in which a case is tried and the order in which a people forms its judgment are not the same and need not run in the same direction. The prosecution is arranging its case for the court. The verdict it most needs to win, however, is being formed elsewhere, at its own pace, and according to a sensibility that is entirely its own.

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