Trial impressions
Like poor Sen. Robin Padilla, who sheepishly admitted needing Google for legal terms, other senator-judges, as well as us ignorant curious, reached out to google what OSNIT and hash values mean.
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Like poor Sen. Robin Padilla, who sheepishly admitted needing Google for legal terms, other senator-judges, as well as us ignorant curious, reached out to google what OSNIT and hash values mean.
Despite all the attention and informed commentaries, many are still grappling, grasping for breath even, over the Veep’s impeachment trial.
After all, it isn’t every day that Generation X and their younger cohorts get invited to a legal-themed revelry they never saw before and where the main protagonists understand only each other.
Worse, it doesn’t help any that whatever notions they had about the law and jurisprudence were being assaulted and reinvented daily by hundreds of hired trolls sowing doubt and misleading claims.
Eccentric as all that may sound, that’s what recalled another historic political-cum-judicial event whose complex processes only a gray-haired and dying generation, the Baby Boomers, have flickering memories of.
Consider the particulars. The last time a very high official faced a momentous impeachment trial was more than three decades ago, the 2000 trial of then President Joseph “Erap” Estrada.
At the time, Generation X and their younger cohorts were either puppy love-struck teeners or lollipop-licking children, which means this is the first time in their lives they’re seriously confronting a political high-stakes impeachment trial.
In fact, a news vignette about the impeachment courtroom gave this credence. A news site reported that each time the defense repeatedly objected to the House prosecutor’s questioning of a witness, it drew chuckles from the audience seated on the sidelines of the courtroom.
Lawyers and those familiar with lawyering, of course, couldn’t place the chuckles. Raising objections, and being overruled or sustained by the presiding judge, is common technical fodder for them.
Still, a major newspaper, probably sensing that the rest of the populace needed assistance, had to define precisely what those terms meant.
Similarly, ignorant social media posters were happily taking down the prosecution’s use of photocopies in their presentation documents.
As is usual with the fake news syndrome, the claims simply lacked context. The Supreme Court, in a 2025 ruling, ruled that photocopies of both paper-based and electronic documents are admissible as evidence in court.
Meanwhile, came also the turn of Generation X and Baby Boomers to openly gape and scratch their heads when the National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) digital forensics expert described preserving digital evidence using technical jargon OSINT (Open-Source Intelligence) and hash values.
Like poor Sen. Robin Padilla, who sheepishly admitted needing Google for legal terms, other senator-judges, as well as us ignorant curious, reached out to google what OSNIT and hash values meant.
Still, by the trial’s third day there were encouraging signs the public was learning fast about the law and accountability and appreciating what was going on, to the extent of even making House prosecution lawyer Amando Ligutan a rock star.
Anyway, as all these occurred those outside the courtroom were also trying their best to do their own thing. And easily topping the attention-grabbing schemes was the Veep herself.
In a cinematic Tuesday visit to the Senate, ostensibly only to meet with her defense team, the Veep obviously projected her fearlessness against her impeachment tormentors. A self-projection which she furthered by her terse “in this bloodbath and bludgeoning, I will be bloodied but unbowed.” In this she failed, however.
Her charitable critics quickly spotted her gore-laced declaration referenced her detained father’s favorite poem, William Ernest Henley’s “Invictus.”
Less charitable critics promptly mocked her, pointing out that “Invictus” was also the favored poem of mass killers like executed Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh who killed 168 people in 1995.
