Trial by jury
There are strong suspicions our authoritarian-enamored, cynical feudalistic/dynastic families, without ever admitting it, still harbor secularized notions of the kingly ‘divine right to rule.’
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There are strong suspicions our authoritarian-enamored, cynical feudalistic/dynastic families, without ever admitting it, still harbor secularized notions of the kingly ‘divine right to rule.’
Noticed but not emphasized enough is the politically significant fact that the Veep’s ongoing impeachment trial at the Senate is through the constitutionally mandated trial by jury.
While not as headline-grabbing compared to the impunities revealed so far or the pleasure derived from trashing Robin Padilla for his off-tangent vulgarities, a renewed scrutiny for why it’s a trial by jury is consequential to how we view government and politics.
And the first thing we must realize is that in the Veep’s trial by jury its members are our self-absorbed 24 senators, who may or may not know why they’re jurors.
Besides that, our next big realization should be that whatever facts emerge from the trial couldn’t have arisen if a trial by jury isn’t the way to ferret out the facts and the truth.
“A ‘fact’ is an act, something done, a deed. In the history of the West, its prominence as an elemental unit of knowledge is closely associated with the emergence of trial by jury…,” writes American historian and journalist Jill Lepore in her substantial new book “The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State.”
“The establishment of trial by jury — replacing trial by ordeal, which allowed the hand of God to determine guilt or innocence — led both to a new law of evidence and to what has been called ‘the culture of facts’: the idea that an observed or witnessed act or thing — the substance, the matter, the fact — is the basis of truth,” further writes Harvard professor Lepore.
As we can see, especially after the mention of God, the crucial point to seriously consider is the “turn from mystery to facts.”
Why it’s crucial becomes clearer when we apply in that sense, for instance, the House prosecution panel’s efforts last week to unravel the “facts” about the “mystery” of where millions of the Veep’s confidential funds went in so short a time.
Beyond that practical sense, however, is also the fact that it goads us to dive deeper into how our hopelessly unrepentant feudalistic/dynastic politicians treat “facts” and “mystery.”
Difficult as that may sound at first, it however becomes understandable once we know that by their very nature hypocritical Filipino feudalistic/dynastic political families prefer cloaking themselves in “mystery” rather than “facts” in their pathological need for power.
Why the mania for “mystery?”
Well, because there are strong suspicions our authoritarian-enamored, cynical feudalistic/dynastic families, without ever admitting it, still harbor secularized notions of the kingly “divine right to rule.”
Such a throwback to the hoary notion of “divine right to rule” almost always allows them to claim outright, or surround themselves with, the mystique that their shady political or financial activities using public funds cannot be questioned, much less be accounted for.
But democracy, especially in a fledgling liberal democracy such as ours, requires “questioning the mysteries of state: challenging the divine right of kings, and arguing instead for the sovereignty of the people,” writes Lepore.
Upholding the people’s sovereignty, in short, demands laying aside “the world of mystery and enchantment and face facts.”
In the case of the Veep’s trial, it ideally means the senator/judges, or more accurately the jurors, personally judiciously examine the facts and act with probity and fairness as they’re individually the people’s representatives and are obliged to uphold the democracy we know.
As such, the senator-judges, even if their political self-interests are at stake, can’t be biased partisans, much more act as if they’re the kept pets of feudalistic Filipino political dynasties.
