Sara’s persecutors give up on ‘dead man’s switch’ charge

LAST Wednesday, the House prosecution panel did something no confident litigator would ever do: It abandoned its own witnesses en masse, signaling they were giving up on their absurd “kill-BBM” impeachment charge, Article 4 of the case against Sara Duterte.

Lead prosecutor and Batangas Rep. Gerville Luistro announced they would no longer present six witnesses lined up to prove Article IV — the charge that Vice President Sara Duterte threatened to have President Marcos, the first lady and former House speaker Martin Romualdez killed if she is killed, presumably as ordered by them. Even the defense was surprised that the prosecution had withdrawn its subpoena for Sara’s chief of staff, Zuleika Lopez, to testify.

Private prosecutor Lorna Kapunan, reportedly the prosecution team’s star lawyer, had to be deployed to add to two prosecutors’ blah-blahs to “manifest” — in violation of fair-play procedure, the presiding judge Sen. Francis Escudero later ruled — that the past two witnesses had already argued sufficiently for the threat charge, and they just wanted to save the court’s time.

They were whistling as they passed the graveyard where one of the four articles of the impeachment, Sara’s alleged threat, was being buried. What they did was not trim a witness list for efficiency. It was a prosecution team quietly folding its tent on the one charge it had chosen, tellingly, to present first.

No news report in mainstream media, no opinion writer reported on this undeniable major development in Marcos’ project to remove Sara from the political landscape — yet another evidence of Philippine media’s shameful support for this hated regime.

Sources claimed that the “private prosecutors” — a euphemism for the expensive lawyers like Kapunan hired by the House Justice Committee — had told the House prosecuting panel that not only was it a waste of time to have the six witnesses testify. They practically lectured the House members that Sara’s threat to kill the First Couple after she was killed was of the “deadman’s switch” genre, a mechanism set up by somebody whose death triggers the killing of his targets. This, however, exists only in the world of fiction, not reality.

Worse, the playing of the video of Sara angrily making the “threat” against Marcos may have been an affront to polite society but was cheered on by the masses who revile the president whom they want to “be done away.”

Matibag

What remains of Article IV’s evidence is a single witness: NBI Director Melvin Matibag, now scheduled to testify next Tuesday. Luistro told the court that Matibag’s testimony “would be sufficient in proving Article 4” — a remarkable claim as Matibag was appointed to the post only last February and has nothing to do with the case against Sara.

Worse for the prosecution, Matibag will be entering the Senate hall with the stink of being accused by Sen. Pia Cayetano of trying to intimidate senator-judges by publicly floating an investigation into alleged funding irregularities on a project tied to her brother, Sen. Alan Peter Cayetano. Whatever the merits of that dispute, it means the prosecution’s sole remaining witness on the assassination charge is walking into the chamber already accused of leveraging unrelated law-enforcement threats against the very senators who will judge his testimony. That is not the profile of a clean, decisive final witness. It is the profile of a prosecution scraping the bottom of a barrel it emptied on purpose.

Prosecutor Rep. Lorens Defensor — a second cousin of Mike Defensor, whom the Marcos camp recently jailed on obviously trumped-up charges — tried to spin the mass withdrawal as a sign of strength, saying the panel had “established its case” and that additional witnesses “could be counterproductive” — comparing it, in a line that deserves to be remembered, to spoiling a dish with too many ingredients. The congressmen/prosecutors had to call an entire press briefing just to refute claims that withdrawing witnesses showed a weak case. When lawyers spend a press conference denying the obvious inference from their own actions, that is usually because the obvious inference is correct.

None of this should surprise anyone who examined the underlying claim honestly from the start. Sara’s “threat” — that she had “talked to somebody” who would act against the First Couple and Romualdez if she herself were killed — was an emotional outburst by someone who felt so helpless that the most powerful officials of the land were out to take her out, even physically eliminate not just her but her chief of staff, her longtime friend.

Her threat belongs to the same kind of emotional outbursts of a victim, “if you kill me, my ghost will strangle you in your sleep,” or “my Archangel Gabriel will strike you down and throw you to hell.” What makes these analogous is not tone but structure: Each invokes an avenger — a ghost, an archangel, an unnamed “somebody” — whose actual capacity to execute the threat cannot reasonably exist. No lawyer of Duterte’s could sue a hired killer for breach of contract on her behalf after her death. No escrow account could release payment to an assassin once his client is already gone. Who confirms the client is dead? Is there an assassin so moral as to fulfill a contract with somebody already dead?

No case

Despite centuries of assassinations, organized crime and intelligence operations, there is no authenticated case of a contract killing arranged to execute only after the person who ordered it had died. The oft-repeated tale that gangster Dutch Schultz ordered Thomas Dewey’s murder before his own 1935 death is unsubstantiated fiction — and gangsters, whatever their other vices, aren’t exactly renowned for posthumous loyalty to dead clients.

Even screenwriters, whose entire craft is making the implausible believable, wouldn’t touch this premise until they had a mechanical gimmick to make it work. Posthumous “revenge by proxy” only became a workable movie plot after the 1980s, when implantable heart monitors let writers invent bombs triggered by a stopped heartbeat rather than by a human being awaiting instructions from a corpse. Automatic mechanisms are believable. A “somebody” waiting on a phantom order is not — and Duterte described no mechanism at all, only a person.

There are, of course, cultures with real revenge traditions — the Moro custom of ridu, cycles of retaliatory clan violence after a patriarch’s killing — but nothing in Duterte’s crude remark suggests she had that kind of institution in mind, and neither, evidently, did NBI investigators, who could never determine that any actual “somebody” existed, largely because Duterte’s camp never cooperated with their inquiry.

Indeed, prosecution witness National Bureau of Investigation officer Jeremy Lotoc, after intense cross-examination by defense lawyer Marc Vinluan, struggled to defend his agency’s investigation of Sara’s “dead man’s switch” by claiming that since it was a threat against the highest official of the land, it was a “national security concern.” This NBI officer, after claiming he was a digital forensic expert as he took a two-week online course on it, resorted to claiming he was a national security specialist.

Wednesday’s mass withdrawal matters more than any single day of testimony has so far. A prosecution confident in an assassination-conspiracy case does not just drop six witnesses. It does that when it has quietly concluded, as any objective observer already had, that the underlying charge cannot survive sustained scrutiny, and that the safest path forward is to get in, get out, and move quickly to the remaining three charges.

Sara Duterte’s “threat” against Marcos is certainly unbecoming behavior of a vice president. But a House of Representatives controlled by Marcos, or a Senate nearly also at his command, cannot be the one to decide if she is unfit or not to be the vice president, or the likely president in 2028. Let the voters in 2028 decide that, especially since 32 million in 2022, an overwhelming 62 percent of votes cast, believed she should be the deputy president to succeed a disabled president.

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Sara’s persecutors give up on ‘dead man’s switch’ charge
Source: Breaking News PH