Susan asks Supreme Court: Let me pursue FPJ protest

Actress Susan Roces, the widow of defeated presidential candidate Fernando Poe Jr., has asked the Supreme Court to grant her petition for substitution on behalf of her husband, who had claimed he was cheated of victory in last year’s elections.

Roces, Jesusa Sonora Poe in real life, made this appeal before the Supreme Court sitting as the Presidential Electoral Tribunal (PET) through her lawyer Sixto Brillantes in a 46-page reply to President Arroyo’s own reply to her original petition to intervene as substitute.

Poe was Mrs. Arroyo’s chief rival in the closely fought presidential race. He and running mate, former senator Loren Legarda were in the midst of challenging Mrs. Arroyo’s win before the PET when the former actor succumbed to massive stroke last December. A notice of Poe’s death was formally filed with the PET last January.

Roces has denied seeking to take her husband’s place in leading the opposition.

In the same petition, Roces emphasized that she has the right to pursue the electoral protest as Poe’s heir after his death.

"Wherefore in the light of all the foregoing and with the interest of the Filipino people as the overriding and paramount consideration, is most respectfully prayed by herein intervenor-substitute protestant that her prayer in her original petition-motion to intervene as substitute dated and filed on Jan. 10, 2005 be granted and approved by the honorable tribunal," Roces said.

It was obvious in Mrs. Arroyo’s reply that she wants to prolong the normal court process by raising various legal and procedural niceties by way of "affirmative special defenses" that were also raised in the vice presidential protest, but was rejected by the PET, according to Roces.

She claimed Mrs. Arroyo is "most apprehensive if not so fearful" of what might come out in the protest as to "who was truly voted upon and who was legitimately elected as president."

The President has asked the PET to disallow Roces from carrying the cudgels for her late husband, citing the tribunal has no jurisdiction to decide on petitions for substitution.

But Roces took note of the process of electoral protests being "imbued with paramount public interest."

"It is the right to public office that is personal... the death of the protestant (Poe) extinguished the personal right but not the public interest," she stressed.

Roces maintained Mrs. Arroyo was mistaken when she told the PET that only second and third placers in the May 10 polls can initiate a protest.

She slammed the President for brushing aside the issue that this is a mere continuation of an existing and surviving protest.