JPE deserves a fair shake
“Let them decide. Until now, they have not decided. It has been pending for more than 10 years. No evidence against me has been presented.
Daily Tribune“Let them decide. Until now, they have not decided. It has been pending for more than 10 years. No evidence against me has been presented.
An exasperated Chief Presidential Legal Counsel Juan Ponce Enrile scored the diffidence of the courts in finally settling the cases pending against him, primarily the pork barrel cases.
Enrile welcomed the Supreme Court decision to allow the Sandiganbayan to proceed with the pending charges against him.
“Let them decide. Until now, they have not decided. It has been pending for more than 10 years. No evidence against me has been presented,” he said.
The SC earlier ruled to allow the Sandiganbayan to continue hearing the case against Enrile in connection with alleged irregularities in the Priority Development Assistance Fund (PDAF), which was filed against him and two other senators sometime in 2014.
“The prosecution must be allowed to present evidence based on its discretion and by the law and the rules… Its discretion is limited only by the requirement that the evidence must be admissible,” the SC said in a decision dated 27 February and made public only recently.
The Ombudsman charged Enrile, his chief of staff Jessica Lucila Reyes, businesswoman Janet Lim Napoles, Ronald John Lim, and John Raymund de Asis with plunder in the use of his PDAF based on a Special Commission on Audit report covering the use of the legislative pork barrel between 2004 and 2010.
The most recent twist in the PDAF saga of JPE was the decision of the Supreme Court to allow the Sandiganbayan to proceed with his plunder trial.
Voting 13-0, the SC dismissed Enrile’s petition for prohibition of his plunder case.
Enrile argued in a petition that the prosecution’s evidence should be restricted to what was outlined in the prosecution’s Bill of Particulars.
However, the High Court, in an en banc ruling penned by Associate Justice Maria Filomena Singh, ruled that the prosecution’s evidence was not confined to the Bill of Particulars alone.
It clarified that “a bill of particulars does not and should not narrate the prosecution’s trial plan.”
It is expected that the prosecution will present evidence during the trial that may not be mentioned in the Bill of Particulars, the SC said.
The High Court explained that the “prosecution should be allowed to present evidence at its discretion and in compliance with the law and regulations.”
A demurrer is essentially a motion to dismiss due to insufficiency of prosecution evidence without the need for the accused to present defense evidence.
Enrile’s criminal prosecution started on 5 June 2014 and has been pending since then.
His lawyer, Estelito Mendoza, had said that at every opportunity, Enrile invoked his constitutional right to a speedy trial while reminding the SC of “his vulnerable age as well as that of his counsel.”
Enrile is 100 years old while Mendoza is 94.
The tribunal relented and partially granted Enrile’s petition and ordered the prosecution to submit a bill of particulars as was his earlier motion.
Among these particulars were the amounts of “kickbacks or commissions” that the accused were alleged to have received, the projects under Enrile’s PDAF, and the names of Napoles’s supposed nongovernmental organizations that allegedly profited from those projects.
Citing his advanced age and poor health, the Supreme Court granted Enrile bail in August 2015. But the antigraft court’s Third Division denied his appeal to throw out the plunder charge.
Enrile should get a fair shake in the allegations against him to allow him to clear his name while he is still able to.