Garchitorena digs himself a big, big hole

Sandiganbayan presiding justice Francis Garchitorena has dug himself a big, big hole. His facial features, often imperious, arrogant even, are slowly turning into a portrait of Dorian Grey, besieged by Father Time, besieged by a rising anti-Sandiganbayan public tide now up to his waist, besieged by a court scandal that has eluded his usual mastery of crisis. Can he get out of this hole? Nobody really knows. But there are those who say that eventually Justice Garchitorena will have to resign because he is on the wrong side of history.

The case is utter simplicity itself. Only a cluster of pro-Estrada lawyers in and out of court, including possibly six justices in the Supreme Court, are smothering it with high-faluting legal gobbledygook, to quote a famous expression of Sen. Rodolfo Biazon.

All right. The core of the controversy is Justice Anacleto Badoy’s shocking exposé that his boss Garchitorena as early as last June 5, in the presence of two other justices of Division Three, "himself pressured me to resign." Why? Badoy says he cannot thoroughly read "the heart and mind" of Garchitorena as to his motivations, but he would speak up later in the sanctum of the Supreme Court and "Garchitorena will be flabbergasted." Garchitorena flatly denied the accusation, saying the pressure to resign came from Associate Justice Ricardo Ilarde who he quoted as saying: "Mukhang di mo kaya, Jun. Ano kaya kung mag-leave of absence ka?"

Badoy admits that Garchitorena did not tell him in plain language to resign, vamoose, get lost, go jump into the Pasig. Be that as it may, Badoy said, "I am not stupid," stipulating the presiding justice’s language was clear he wanted Badoy out of the Sandiganbayan. It is also clear at this juncture that only Ilarde and another associate justice in Division Three, Teresita Leonardo de Castro, can offer testimony as to who was telling the truth or lying outright. If they are on the side of Garchitorena, they will bear him out. Or else! If not, Justice Ilarde and De Castro will join the forces of Maharishi and keep completely silent while contemplating their navels.

Whatever they say and whatever they do, the Sandiganbayan is in a mess.

It is as I have said all along in so many endless columns that our whole system of government, if not our model of democracy, is now fast breaking up. Our judiciary is already infested with floating anthrax up to the Supreme Court. The latter has yet to rule on the plunder case, Kuratong Baleleng issue, and, worse, has barred the citizenry from getting a fair, balanced, and close-in view of the Estrada trial by summarily and arbitrarily forbidding TV-radio coverage. Our political system had long gone.

The trigger was, of course, the trial of Estrada for plunder, perjury and other charges. Nine – or is it ten? – lawyers of the fallen president, including Estrada himself of course, have long sought the removal of Justice Badoy since – critics say – he couldn’t be bought, he couldn’t be frightened, he couldn’t be bushwhacked. So these lawyers did the next best thing. They resorted to the antics of Mick and Mack, gluing the trial to delay after delay, a hundred delays, another hundred maybe, making utter fools of themselves in the process as they feigned one sickness after another. But who cared? The goose with the golden eggs was their client, and money, money came down like manna from heaven. By this time, including that little preposterous runt Raymond Fortun, all of Erap’s lawyers must be filthy rich.

The trigger must be defined some more.

And it must also be defined in the light of the imbroglio between Justices Francis Garchitorena and Anacleto Badoy. I don’t buy the insinuation that Garchitorena has been bought or suborned, I know this man enough to know he has never worshipped Mammon or Bacchus. But some say it is just possible he has a thin layer of sympathy for Erap Estrada, else why his ruling on the perjury case, getting Estrada out of charges that he lied in his Statement of Assets and Liabilities (only P25 million, if I remember) while, using Jose Velarde as a pseudonym, he reportedly hustled stolen billions to various banks. So Clarissa Ocampo was an unmitigated liar? Your Honor, Sir?

I believe the issue cuts deeper. Garchitorena’s slip – methinks – was showing when he said Badoy was smitten by the "glamor" of presiding the plunder case. That was a bad shot, a cheap shot. The plunder case was assigned to Badoy’s sala, without his seeking it. Many suspect, as do some prosecutors, that Garchitorena, now at the near twilight of his legal career, wanted the plunder case for himself. For this would raise him to the pedestal that he felt he richly deserved because in the judicial world, he was Thor, he was Jupiter, he was Ulysses, he was Prometheus, he was Pygmalion, he was Hercules.

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If this hypothesis is accurate, this explains why in his letter to Supreme Court Chief Justice Hilario Davide, Garchitorena poured scorn on Badoy. If my information is right, all Davide wanted from Garchitorena, was an explanation or a clarification as to why Badoy needed extra staff for his office. Garchitorena, in his reply to the Chief Justice, cut loose with a stinging barrage of criticism – much of it personal – calling Badoy "a liar, incompetent . . . hardly does any work, often absent, comes in very late in the afternoon, often after office hours . . . in the meantime, cases are postponed."

That was mean. Badoy was hogtied, slung from a tree, flogged, humiliated, insulted, disparaged and affronted, lashed as a Negro slave was lashed before Abolition, sent to Coventry by a presiding justice who should have known it is absolutely disgusting to pick your teeth in public.

It is the worst of times; it is the best of times, Charles Dickens said. I have yet to see the best of times. It is the worst of times. You have a fallen and disgraced president pleading for court permission to be let out of the country so his "deteriorating knees" can be operated on. The truth is he wants out, he wants to flee, escape conviction and a possible death sentence. He wants to smile again, to laugh again, to roar with jollity again, carouse with his mistresses again, spend his billions in so many palaces of pleasure abroad, because here he is a prisoner, a spoiled prisoner maybe because he is billeted in a swanky suite at the Veterans Memorial Hospital, but a prisoner nonetheless wilting away daily, caught in a swarm of happy memories when he held sway as a president, when he stood on top of Mount Olympus, and people snapped to reverential attention when he hove into view, an overweight El Cordobes with his rogue bullfighter’s cape, boisterously dodging the law for two and a half years, until finally he slipped, slid down, and the waters came and the maelstrom swallowed his presidency.

Estrada remembers all these things, and all that remains is mist on his face, the sadness, the faraway look as of a reverse Count of Monte Cristo figuring where he went wrong.

But when you look at it, when you sum up contemporary historic events from flagrise to flagfall, you know, you just know, as you survey the present scene, two Sandiganbayan justices locked into each other, and the smell is that of reeking urine, that all these were bound to happen. As I explained to a close friend several days ago, the whole thing was falling apart, the world we knew. Then I thought there was an analogy between what happened to America September 11 and what happened to the Philippines May 1998. as surely as three aircraft knifed into Twin Towers in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, the election of Estrada to the presidency knifed just as lethally into the once proud institutions of our democracy. Now our judiciary is slumped like a carcass over the pavement about to be pushed into an ambulance.

The garbage strewn all over Metro Manila is proof of this political Payatas which over half a century accumulated social, economic and political rubbish, rose into a huge tower of trash, then with the advent of the Estrada presidency fell and collapsed to Ground Zero.

Just like America after September 11, our world is not the same anymore. Who would ever have thought just a year ago that the vermin had dug so deep and People Power II would occur? That Estrada would be impeached, arrested, charged and imprisoned? That this political disaster would in turn show up our judiciary as madcap, money-mad opera bouffe? That peace and order was but a chimera as tons of shabu tumbled into our country, corrupting our police and law enforcement agencies, our bureaucracy all the way up to Malacañang, and converting our Senate into a Taliban stronghold harboring our own version of Osama bin Laden?

That things have come to such a pass and that they finally found their way hog-high into our judiciary is supreme irony. Once upon a time, our courts did us proud, particularly our Supreme Court, and so long as our courts stood vigil, we figured the Republican dikes would hold. But poverty is at an all-time high, and what used to be esteem for our courts is at an all-time low, as crime is a scourge in a cup that runneth over with vomit.

The only bright note struck is Justice Badoy’s statement that "only death can prevent me from being there . . . sitting as the judge" in the Estrada trial.