Now, that wasn’t so hard, was it?
Contrary to his doctors’ fear-mongering, former House speaker Martin Romualdez survived the grueling transport in a top-of-the-line ambulance from his cushy room at the Cardinal Santos Medical Center to the private suite at the hoi polloi’s top medical facility, the Philippine General Hospital.
The way his doctors at Cardinal Santos were warning the Sandiganbayan, the poor, stressed congressman was in such a fragile physical and mental state that even a bumpy ride through partly flooded, potholed streets from San Juan to Taft Avenue in Manila could cause a heart attack.
Fortunately, the Third Division of the Sandiganbayan, under fire for granting bail to another VIP inmate facing plunder charges, former senator Bong Revilla, appears to have undergone an epiphany and would have none of the medical gobbledygook.
Associate Justice Karl Miranda, the third division chair who posed the lone objection to Revilla’s bail, said in Romualdez’s case that hospitalization should “rest purely on medical necessity.”
The court, Miranda said, “must be very careful and dispel any perception that the grant of hospitalization was based on the status, position, wealth or influence of the accused.” Amen.
Ombudsman Jesus Crispin Remulla had the best message to his fraternity brother and (erstwhile?) friend Martin: “Man up to it.”
Another Third Division member, Associate Justice Ronald Moreno, is being asked by Remulla to inhibit from Revilla’s case, whose bail hearing the ombudsman publicly said had been “natrabaho.”
Moreno has ignored the ombudsman’s call, but redeemed himself somewhat in the case of Romualdez. When cardiologist Rody Sy said the Leyte congressman needed continued confinement at Cardinal Santos for four to six weeks to recover from the stress of his court indictment, Moreno cited the immense public pressure the court is facing and quipped: “Four to six weeks? Minumura na po kami ng tao.”
Last week, Interior Secretary Jonvic Remulla had told “Storycon” on One News that he himself had to go to Cardinal Santos because the hospital staff were preventing the police team from entering to find Romualdez and serve the arrest warrant.
Philippine National Police chief Jose Melencio Nartatez also had to go to the hospital himself, where they were presented with the medical problems afflicting Romualdez – a much lengthened list from the initial “anxiety attack” and “cardiovascular event” told to Secretary Jonvic.
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Considering how hospitals are being turned into a refuge for accused scoundrels, law enforcement agencies should meet with the Department of Health and the hospital associations to discuss how to prevent the abuse of legitimate needs for medical intervention to escape detention without bail.
Even in the national prisons, moneyed inmates have paid off crooked guards and corrections officials to stay in private hospitals. And the crooks used medical gobbledygook to justify their actions.
The most notorious example was convicted “Shabu Queen” Yu Yuk Lai, who was found to have spent 10 months from November 2014 supposedly confined at the Metropolitan Medical Center in Binondo, Manila instead of serving her sentence at the Correctional Institution for Women.
Corrections officers told a Senate inquiry that Yu Yuk Lai needed private hospital confinement for afflictions that included anxiety, depression and “facial pain” that required therapy and further laboratory tests.
The hospital stay was allowed even with Yu Yuk Lai’s record of using medical issues to evade punishment. In July 2000, while still on trial and held without bail at the Manila City Jail for drug trafficking, she was found gambling at the Casino Filipino at the Holiday Inn Manila Pavilion while supposedly hospitalized.
The Supreme Court (SC) later sacked Manila Regional Trial Court judge Manuel Muro, who approved the private hospital confinement “for medical and humanitarian reasons,” along with a Court of Appeals justice who tried to intercede for Muro, Demetriou Demetria.
In its order sacking Muro, the SC cited an independent medical assessment of Yu Yuk Lai, which found her suffering merely from “urinary tract infection, acute vaginitis and estrogen deficiency,” none of which required hospital confinement.
On May 11, 2021, she died of a heart attack complicated by COVID – not in prison, but still in a private hospital, the East Avenue Medical Center.
Anonymous letters had alerted probers and the Supreme Court to the irregularities that led to the sacking of Demetria and Muro. Perhaps personnel of the courts and prosecution services who are concerned about the integrity of the justice system can do the same. The SC can provide a mechanism for anonymous reporting of anomalies.
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Sometimes there’s hope for the Supreme Court. I say sometimes, because its behavior depends on its composition and leadership.
These days, lawyer Ruben Carranza has a question that is shared by many in this looted country: why does the SC have such a soft spot for Imelda Romualdez Marcos?
Five members of the SC’s First Division unanimously reversed the conviction of Imelda Marcos by the Sandiganbayan on seven counts of graft related to the Swiss bank deposits that have been restituted to the Philippines by Switzerland.
SC Associate Justice Rodil Zalameda penned the decision. Concurring were Ramon Paul Hernando, Henri Jean Paul Inting, Ricardo Rosario and Jose Midas Marquez.
The SC decision was made way back on June 10, but made public only on Sept. 9. The timing raised suspicions that the government had hoped to blunt its impact by making it coincide with the arrest of Imeldific’s nephew, Martin Romualdez.
There are also speculations that Zalameda and the two other SC First Division senior members, Hernando and Inting, are angling for promotion to chief justice when Alexander Gesmundo retires this November.
On Storycon last Friday, I asked Carranza if the SC ruling could still be appealed to the entire tribunal. He reminded me that a division of the SC had affirmed the conviction of Imelda by the Sandiganbayan in 1993 on two counts of graft (so the conviction on the seven counts wasn’t the first and only). When Imeldific appealed the case to the SC en banc, the entire court reversed the conviction in 1998. Natrabaho also?
At least Justice Moreno has admitted feeling the heat from the public. Tinatablan din pala ng mura. There’s still some hope if the courts won’t put up with medical gobbledygook.