VP urges ruling on motion for recon

Vice President Sara Duterte attended her arraignment on Friday at the Quezon City Regional Trial Court on the three counts of grave threats filed against her by the Department of Justice.

Her arraignment was originally scheduled for 11 September, but the court deferred it again, this time after her camp asked Quezon City Regional Trial Court (RTC) Branch 98 Judge Maria Angelica P. de Ramos to rule on their Motion for Partial Reconsideration.

Atty. Paul Lawrence Lim, Duterte’s counsel, said De Ramos deferred the arraignment and “rescheduled it to some other date” to study their motion.

Several pleas filed

Lim said that while their motion for De Ramos to inhibit from the case was denied at the hearing on 11 September, the judge has to rule on their motion and wait for the Supreme Court to rule on their Motion for Certiorari, where they argued the alleged threats also formed part of the allegations against Duterte in her ongoing impeachment trial before the Senate.

“During the last hearing, we filed a Motion for Inhibition for the presiding judge. He denied it, although he granted our request to defer the arraignment. So we filed a Motion for Partial Reconsideration, asking him to reconsider his decision not to grant our motion for inhibition,” Lim explained in an interview after the hearing.

The DoJ filed the three grave threats charges in August over Duterte’s statements during an online press conference in November 2024 where she said she had hired a hitman to kill President Ferdinand Marcos Jr., First Lady Liza Araneta-Marcos, and then House Speaker Martin Romualdez if she herself were killed.

Duterte has denied the allegations.

On 4 September, the Quezon City RTC issued an arrest warrant for Duterte on the charges. The Vice President posted the required bail of P120,000 for each count the following day.

The DAILY TRIBUNE earlier reported that Judge De Ramos disclosed that she and Vice President Sara Duterte were sorority sisters in the same law school sorority.