Inordinate delay

South Koreans impeached their president Yoon Suk Yeol on Dec. 14 last year for briefly imposing martial law on Dec. 3 to quell opposition to his government.

Also impeached on Dec. 12 were the justice minister and national police chief. The former defense chief was arrested days earlier. The prime minister who took over from Yoon in an acting capacity was also impeached on Dec. 27 for refusing to fill vacancies in the Constitutional Court.

At around that time in Manila, impeachment complaints were filed at the House of Representatives against Vice President Sara Duterte, for multiple offenses including corruption and betrayal of public trust over her alleged misuse of over P600 million in confidential funds as VP and secretary of education.

On Jan. 15, Korean police and anti-corruption investigators raided the presidential compound and detained Yoon. He was formally arrested on Jan. 19 and indicted on Jan. 26 for attempted rebellion but released on March 7.

On March 24, Korea’s Constitutional Court reversed the prime minister’s impeachment and restored him as acting president. On April 4, the Constitutional Court upheld Yoon’s impeachment and removed him from office, and called an election within 60 days. That was less than four months from his impeachment.

Last June 3, with a voter turnout of nearly 80 percent, South Korea elected opposition leader Lee Jae-myung as president. That was just six months from the day the impeachable offense was committed.

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In our case, the first complaints to impeach Vice President Sara Duterte were filed on Dec. 2 at the House of Representatives. It took two months of wheeling and dealing at the HOR before four complaints were consolidated and the Articles of Impeachment forwarded to the Senate, which has the constitutional duty to convene as an impeachment court “forthwith” – or, in the official Filipino translation, “agad.”

Senate President Chiz Escudero also has a valid observation about the sense of urgency in the HOR: the Articles of Impeachment were transmitted to the Senate on Feb. 5, just two hours before the 19th Congress was set to adjourn for the election campaign break.

Escudero said the Senate would not be rushed into trial during the session break, and would instead draw up rules for the first-ever impeachment trial of a vice president of the republic.

Some legal experts at the time said Escudero could comply with the constitutional mandate to hold the trial forthwith by taking his oath as the presiding judge of the impeachment court, to be followed by the oath-taking of the senator-judges.

Escudero refused to perform even this act. “Forthwith” dragged on for four months – the time it took for the South Koreans to remove their president by impeachment. And here we are, still waiting for the trial to get underway.

Last Monday, Escudero finally took the oath as presiding judge of the impeachment court. This came after hours of plenary debates on a motion of the minority to get the trial going pronto.

Yesterday, the 4 p.m. oath-taking of the 22 other senator-judges was delayed by over two hours because Dela Rosa was allowed to deliver a privilege speech, which he said was his precondition for agreeing to take his oath. The speech called for the dismissal, even before trial, of the impeachment complaint for being constitutionally infirm due to the dilly-dallying of the House in transmitting the complaint to the Senate – an argument of the VP’s camp.

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It’s early days yet, and Sen. Robinhood Padilla, who says he’s familiar with court proceedings being an ex-convict, might yet muster support for his resolution to declare the impeachment process “effectively terminated.”

The clever phrasing must have been cooked up by the same legal minds behind Dela Rosa’s proposed “de facto dismissal” of the impeachment complaint even before trial, using the same arguments that he raised yesterday.

Escudero ruled that the Senate must first convene as an impeachment court before the complaints can be dismissed or the impeachment nullified, as moved by the pro-Duterte senators.

Dela Rosa cited the delay, which he described as unconstitutional, in the HOR’s actions, from the filing of the impeachment complaints until their submission to the Senate at the eleventh hour.

We have become familiar with a term for this: “inordinate delay.” It has been successfully invoked in dismissing criminal charges for large-scale corruption involving billions in public funds, from the kleptocracy during the Marcos dictatorship to the misuse of congressional pork barrel funds.

In many cases, the defendants themselves contributed to the inordinate delay, with their lawyers resorting to delaying tactics, and then invoking the long-drawn-out prosecution to win a dismissal that isn’t based on the merits of the charges. And for millions of reasons, judges and justices have sided with the defense in many high-profile cases.

Precedents have been set and it looks like “inordinate delay” will pave the way for the courts’ dismissal of all the ill-gotten wealth cases against the Marcoses and their cronies.

Now the impeachment case against the nation’s second highest official may also be junked due to inordinate delay, by both the House and the Senate.