[ANALYSIS] Duterte impeachment trial Day 20: Next witness, please

In broadcast parlance, there is a term news people use to describe when a story begins to droop—or “lumalaylay”—the moment the narrative becomes dry and unengaging.

They use it to describe a video story that is dragging, losing its momentum, because the narrative becomes boring, too long, and fails to keep the viewer's interest.

That's exactly how some people felt on Day 20 of the impeachment trial of Vice President Sara Duterte, especially when two senator-judges declared that the two Army colonels presented were not competent enough to prove that the VP, then Education secretary, had misused some P15 million released to her Department, part of a total of P75 million in confidential funds beginning December 2022.

Senator-judges Ping Lacson and Kiko Pangilinan could not conceal their disbelief after Col. Manaros Boransing II and Col. Magtanggol Panopio took the witness stand one after the other and, after several questions from prosecution lawyer Rey Robles and fellow senator-judges, repeatedly denied that they ever received anything from Duterte’s confidential funds.

The two issued a certification that Duterte’s Education Department had taken part in the military’s 2023 Youth Leadership Summit and Information Education Communication programs meant to reach out to young men and women, both in and out of school, and prevent them from getting swayed to join either the communist or the Moro insurgents. The youth summits focused only on students in Grades 7 through 12, excluding college students.

The certification said the programs were a success, but they didn’t know that the department would one day use it to support the Department’s liquidation report.

Like the last three hearings involving two hostile witnesses, the trial on Tuesday, Sept. 1, ran in circles.

Boransing and Panopio stated that not a single peso from the OVP or DepEd was downloaded to their respective infantry groups, and that neither one of them had the competence to judge the DepEd's confidential operations because they are no intel men. The expenses for the 2023 YLS and IEC activities came from Philippine Army budgets and local government unit allocations.

DepEd spent for their contingent, they said.

Robles tried to pin down the two colonels by linking their certification to Duterte’s misuse of funds, but to no avail.

Their repeated denials ran counter to the prosecution’s claim that Duterte’s camp had supposedly announced that the two were beneficiaries of confidential funds in exchange for issuing the Department a certification for its participation, but had to deny receipt of money when the complaints against Duterte supposedly had become too hot to handle during the hearing at the House of Representatives in October 2024.

By that same logic, Boransing and Panopio were expected to give Duterte away in Tuesday’s trial. But it didn’t happen.

The P15 million could have benefited others, but the prosecution failed to get any information from the two military officers.

It didn’t happen, and the two were not even hostile witnesses. The defense didn’t bother to cross-examine the two witnesses.

Still, the prosecution insisted that DepEd used the two colonels to circumvent COA rules when COA was demanding a success report on its confidential operations, according to Robles, who landed No. 10 in the 1990 bar examination topped by former senator Koko Pimentel.

Given all the brouhaha, presiding officer, senator-judge Chiz Escudero reminded the trial that the COA had given the DepEd a credit notice, almost a clean bill of health, though not yet final, for the Department’s P75 million confidential funds.

Until after the COA reversed its findings, and it had three years to do so, the impeachment court had to make do with the last COA findings.

With their denial, the prosecution’s narrative was falling short of expectations. A spokesman for the prosecution said that the burden of proof to show Duterte was not guilty had shifted to the defense, an all-too familiar line from the prosecution before and after a hearing.

Escudero reminded the court of the opposite rules.

“The burden of evidence shifts, but the burden of proof does not shift,” he said, maintaining that it is for the prosecution to prove her guilt, not the other way around.

The burden of proof is a fundamental legal principle in evidence law. It means that the ultimate responsibility to prove a case stays with the same person from start to finish, but the duty to present evidence moves back and forth between sides during a trial.

Neither Baronsing nor Panopio could say if Duterte had misused the fund. Nor could they say that Duterte had used them, “nabudol sila,” to borrow the words of prosecution spokesman Benny Abante.

Boransing and Panopio are active, professional soldiers. The senator-judges thanked them for appearing in court and for their service to the nation.

It wasn’t clear why the prosecution was so heavy in mouthing its own press release, but lacked the resolve in getting a witness with the required gravitas, or why its lawyer failed to see the real story in the appearance of the two witnesses to pin down Duterte in pushing through with the alleged misuse of confidential funds.

Senator-judge Bam Aquino made a strong point about a possible misuse of the P15 million confidential funds. The military has been holding YLS and IEC for more than 20 years.

To date, it spends anywhere between P30,000 and P50,000 to hold its own. Isn’t P15 million too much for a similar program?

We wonder why the prosecution didn’t study that point before they presented the two military colonels as witnesses. The prosecution should have been the one pounding that point, not just Bam.

And this is where we feel that the prosecution needs not only a material witness next time around. It is now clear it needs a project manager to direct, space its witnesses for maximum impact—if only to get the viewers back.

In complex, high-stakes legal proceedings, a project manager of the prosecution—frequently referred to as a prosecution trial manager or a legal project manager—is a dedicated professional responsible for overseeing the logistics, timelines, resources, and administrative workflows of a prosecution team.

They don't want things to droop. Do they?

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not reflect the opinions of PhilSTAR L!fe, its parent company and affiliates, or its staff.