Sara thanks defense team for SC impeachment ruling

MANILA, Philippines — Vice President Sara Duterte finally broke her silence yesterday following a unanimous vote from the Supreme Court declaring the Articles of Impeachment lodged by the House of Representatives against  her as “unconstitutional,” thanking the defense team and the petitioners “for having the conviction to challenge the abuses of the House of Representatives.”

“I extend my heartfelt gratitude to the members of the defense team for taking on my case, even when no one else was willing to stand by me,” Duterte said in a statement issued by the Office of the Vice President.

The OVP has yet to confirm that Duterte already arrived in the country following her trips to The Hague, Netherlands and South Korea where she visited her detained father, former president Rodrigo Duterte from July 6 to July 23 and attended a “Bring Duterte Home” campaign on July 27 with the Filipino community, respectively.

Duterte was scheduled to return to the Philippines on July 28, the day of the fourth State of the Nation Address of President Marcos.

Indirect contempt?

Meanwhile, several lawyers filed a petition before the Supreme Court (SC) seeking to cite for indirect contempt poverty alleviation czar Larry Gadon, Akbayan party-list Rep. Percival Cendaña and political analyst Richard Heydarian over their remarks on the recent SC ruling on Duterte’s impeachment.

Lawyers Ferdinand Topacio, Mark Kristopher Tolentino and Rolex Suplico filed the petition against Gadon, Cendaña and Heydarian before the SC yesterday.

In a seven-page pleading, Topacio cited the public interviews where Gadon “openly and publicly accused the SC of being politically aligned with the Duterte family.”

Meanwhile, Suplico and Tolentino cited Heydarian’s Facebook post where it said 13 out of the 15 justices are Duterte appointees.

They said the post was not just a commentary but a purposeful and malicious effort to depict the current justices as indebted to the former president.

“It deliberately and maliciously framed the Justices as beholden to former President Rodrigo Duterte, thereby attributing impropriety, lack of independence, and judicial bias to the Supreme Court as an institution,” their petition read.

For Cendaña, the lawyers cited his interviews with news outlets, calling the high court a coddler of Duterte.

“The phrase ‘Supreme Coddler,’ when spoken by a sitting congressman, carries institutional weight and has the potential to de-legitimize judicial rulings in the eyes of the public, thereby weakening the public’s trust in the final arbiter of the law,” the pleading read. – Daphne Galvez, Jose Rodel Clapano