Erap’s trial that collapsed
Drilon knew Joseph “Erap” Estrada for years before the impeachment trial began in December 2000. He was not part of Erap’s inner circle. He had supported Erap’s 1998 presidential run, and he became Senate President for the first time that July. But the alliance, in his own words, was never close.
Erap had won the presidency in 1998 by the largest margin in Philippine electoral history. He had built a career, on screen and in the Senate, as a champion of the poor. He was one of the “Magnificent 12” senators who voted to end the American military bases treaty in 1991. His fall, when it came, was as dramatic as his rise.
It began in October 2000, when Ilocos Sur Governor Luis “Chavit” Singson accused Erap of taking nearly 600 million pesos in payoffs — money Singson said came from illegal gambling operations and diverted tobacco tax funds meant for farmers in his province. The scandal became known as Juetengate. Singson’s testimony carried weight precisely because he was not a political rival. He had been Erap’s ally.
Drilon called for an investigation almost immediately. In November, then-Camarines Sur Governor Luis Villafuerte tried to talk him out of treating the matter as a crisis, arguing it was a passing political storm. Drilon disagreed. Some things, he told Villafuerte, are bigger than politics. Weeks later, Drilon, House Speaker Manuel Villar, and more than forty legislators withdrew from Erap’s coalition. It cost Drilon the Senate presidency, a month after Singson’s revelations and just before the House impeachment vote.
The trial opened 7 December 2000 — the first impeachment of a sitting head of state in Asia. Supreme Court Chief Justice Hilario Davide Jr. presided. Twenty-one senators sat as judges. The prosecution, led by Congressman Joker Arroyo, accused Erap of bribery, graft, culpable violation of the Constitution, and betrayal of public trust. The defense, led by former Chief Justice Andres Narvasa, assembled some of the country’s most formidable legal names.
The case turned on a single piece of evidence: a sealed envelope, believed to contain records tying Erap to a hidden bank account. On 16 January 2001, the senator-judges voted 11–10 against opening it. Drilon had voted to open it. Then House prosecutor Joker Arroyo, in protest, declared that the prosecution rested, a walkout, not a concession. Senate President Aquilino “Nene” Pimentel Jr. resigned on the spot. Nine more opposition senators followed him out of the chamber.
Drilon describes the moment as the collapse of the constitutional process itself — not merely the end of a trial, but the emptying of legitimacy from the room. The case could not go on without them, and everyone knew it. What followed did not happen in the Senate. It happened in the streets. Within days, crowds filled EDSA again. The military withdrew its backing. Erap left Malacañang. Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo was sworn in as president.
For Drilon, the lesson was not really about Erap. It was that when institutions fail to complete their own process, the people will complete it for them.
Corona’s trial that finished
Eleven years later, Drilon sat again as a senator-judge, this time for the impeachment of Chief Justice Renato Corona in 2011 and 2012.
He had opposed Corona’s appointment from the start, calling it a “midnight appointment” by outgoing President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, made just after the 2010 election, after Corona had served eight years as her chief of staff and before that as associate justice.
The House impeached Corona on 12 December 2011, with eight articles. Most concerned favoritism toward the Arroyo administration and abuse of judicial funds. But the case that stuck, and the only one that led to conviction, was Article II: Corona’s failure to accurately declare his assets and liabilities on his Statement of Assets, Liabilities and Net Worth, or SALN. Prosecutors said he failed to disclose a Taguig apartment and large undeclared bank deposits.
Drilon was Corona’s most persistent critic on the impeachment court. He watched the trial’s theatrical turns — Corona once walking out of the chamber, later returning in a wheelchair after what his lawyers called a medical emergency.
Drilon read these moments plainly: not as spontaneous acts, but as calculated attempts to reframe a legal case as political persecution. The Senate’s public rebuke of the behavior, he writes, backfired on Corona instead.
Conviction imprinted in history
On 29 May 2012, the Senate impeachment court convicted Corona by a vote of 20–3. He became the first chief justice removed by impeachment, and was permanently barred from public office. Senators who voted to convict cited the case of a low-level court employee once dismissed for a minor SALN omission — the principle, as Drilon puts it, that the law applying to an ordinary citizen must apply equally to the country’s highest magistrate.
Here Drilon draws the contrast directly. Where the Estrada trial collapsed in political maneuvering over an unopened envelope, the Corona trial reached its constitutional conclusion. Evidence was presented. Votes were cast. Procedurally, at least, justice was served.
But Drilon does not let himself, or his readers, celebrate too easily. He notes later allegations that senators who voted to convict Corona received additional discretionary funds — a troubling echo, he writes, of the very corruption the trial was meant to punish. If true, it means even a constitutional process that reaches its intended end can still be shadowed by the same politics that derailed justice in 2001.
Same chamber, watching again
Read together, Drilon’s two accounts describe the same institution behaving in two different ways, once buckling under political pressure, once holding, however imperfectly, to its own rules.
That is the frame he brings to the Duterte impeachment trial now underway. His warning about impeachment fatigue is not abstract. It is the same warning the Erap trial should have taught the country in 2001: that public perception, once it turns, can overtake the evidence itself.
And his call for the Senate leadership to actually compress the calendar, not just talk about it, comes from a man who has run that floor and knows how easily a trial can slip out of a chamber’s control.
Drilon’s own answer to the compression question was lost to a technical glitch during the broadcast. But Being Frank already contains his answer, in a different form. In both trials, he writes, he voted his conscience and followed the evidence.
The broader lesson, he says, is sober. Even the country’s highest ideals can be corrupted by the very forces meant to be overcome. The task is not only to make the system work. It is to make sure it works for the right reasons.
Whether the Senate manages that this time, with senator-judges keenly aware of the precedents Drilon lived through, remains the story still being written.
