Lawyers warned vs. keeping mistresses

The Supreme Court under the leadership of Chief Justice Renato Puno has strongly warned lawyers to refrain from maintaining mistresses, otherwise they might be sanctioned as what happened to a lawyer in Marikina who was suspended from his profession for three years.

In resolving the case filed against lawyer Luciano Valencia, the SC en banc issued a resolution promulgated on January 23, this year, that read, "the Court did not hesitate to discipline a lawyer for keeping a mistress in defiance of the mores and sense of morality of the community."

The SC justices have ruled that a lawyer shall not engage in unlawful, dishonest, immoral or deceitful conduct.

"It may be difficult to specify the degree of moral delinquency that may qualify an act as immoral, yet, for purposes of disciplining a lawyer, immoral conduct has been defined as that conduct with willful, flagrant or shameless, and which shows a moral indifference to the opinion of the respectable members of the community," it added.

The case of Valencia stemmed from the complaint filed by a certain Clarita Samala who accused him of not only keeping a woman other than his legal wife, but also for representing both conflicting parties of a case.

When the case was investigated by the Board of Governors of the Integrated Bar of the Philippines, Valencia admitted he had three children by his other woman even before his legal wife died in 1997.

But Valencia justified his transgression by saying that he does not have any relationship with that woman named Lagmay and despite the fact that he sired her three children, he does not consider them as his second family.

One year after the death of his wife, he quickly married Lagmay.

But the SC justices said, "the fact still remains that Valencia did not live up to the exacting standard of morality and decorum required of the legal profession." - Rene U. Borromeo