[ANALYSIS] Duterte impeachment trial Day 21: Who is the 'abogadong walang alam'?

Day 21 of the impeachment trial of Vice President Sara Duterte was anything but smooth.

The proceedings on Wednesday, Sept. 2 showed chaos when contending lawyers of the prosecution and the defense clashed over so many things, beginning with the phrase “abogadong walang alam” the prosecution used to describe the day’s witness, lawyer Michael Poa at the opening of the trial.

The presiding officer, senator-judge Chiz Escudero, ordered the phrase—roughly, a lawyer who doesn’t know anything—be stricken from the record, at the behest of the defense counsel Sheila Sison, both saying it smacked of a lack of respect for a fellow lawyer.

Escudero called out prosecution counsel Benjamin Tolosa Jr. for the remark. Tolosa apologized to Poa, saying he didn’t mean to offend him, but refused to give in at once until Escudero repeated his ruling to reinforce it.

Sison said it best: Tolosa could have said instead that Poa had "no personal knowledge" if he wanted to refer to Poa’s lack of knowledge as to how Duterte’s confidential funds and the subsequent liquidation reports were managed, as flagged by the Commission on Audit.

The prosecution noted that Poa said the same thing all throughout the time he had appeared for similar queries at the House of Representatives in November 2024.

“Discourteous,” said Sison, calling Tolosa’s remarks uncalled for. She fiercely objected, demanding protection from "harsh and insulting demeanor.”

Tolosa asked Sison to stop pontificating.

He claimed Duterte chose Poa to respond to the COA despite Poa's claimed lack of knowledge on confidential funds.

Escudero stopped him short, saying that the prosecution had its share of pontificating and that, in fact, the prosecution had pontificated more than the defense during the trial. He scolded the lawyers for wasting time on personal "intramurals" and called on the public for patience.

It was indeed a battle of wits among the lawyers, as both the prosecution and the defense had been quick on the draw.

There was an obvious mismatch as both Sison and Poa were on the same side. Escudero sustained Sison’s objections, by our last count, five times, especially when Tolosa turned verbose, or made much ado about Poa’s credentials when trying to establish that Poa was Duterte’s most trusted man.

Tolosa is one of the prosecution’s most visible spokesmen. Before and after the trial, he tried to, in his own words, “laymanize” the technical side of the trial to explain it to the public and battle fake news. Laymanize has become a favorite word of the prosecution panel.

But Tolosa’s job as a spokesman had indeed allowed him some elbow room that when facing newsmen, he was editorializing most of the time, if not litigating and grandstanding outside the trial. His description of Poa as “abogadong walang alam” was just one of those supposedly good soundbites.

But on Day 21, he was standing there at the podium as prosecution lawyer in the trial room. It was his first appearance as prosecutor in the impeachment trial.

Tolosa and Poa are spokesmen for their respective panels.

Over the past many weeks, Poa has always been cool, calm, and restrained even under pressure, compared to his counterparts in the prosecution.

At Wednesday’s trial, Poa was a hostile witness, being counsel for Duterte and for a time the spokesman of the OVP and DepEd.

Tolosa is good-looking enough and he spoke well, in fact, on behalf of the prosecution.

But while he was good at soundbites off court, throughout the five-hour trial on Day 21, he was the prosecution lawyer whose direct examination of the witnesses was marked by dead air, long pauses, and awkward silence in his speech.

Escudero called Tolosa’s attention about the time he was flipping pages of his documents, leaving the trial in complete silence for a few moments.

Tensions rose again after Tolosa repeatedly cut off Poa's responses mid-testimony. Sison argued that Poa had a right to complete his answers, while the prosecution counter-argued that hostile witnesses require tighter parameters.

Sison admonished Tolosa for using the words “admission” instead of statements and “disbursements” instead of transfer. We wished the prosecution had assigned another lawyer to face Sison.

The prosecution presented Poa in the witness stand in the hope that he, once occupying the highest office close to Duterte, could provide, under intense questioning, the missing information that may give Duterte away—that she “misused” if not “abused some millions of pesos granted to her in confidential funds.

But the prosecution got the same “no personal knowledge” remarks, with some additional information from Poa that Duterte operated her offices with compartmentalized operations, especially when dealing with information, and that the witness had seen a page or two of the documents containing some names of the recipients of the confidential funds. He didn’t think these names were fictitious.

Poa was the third hostile witness who had repeatedly declared having “no knowledge” of the actual use of the funds. OVP’s special disbursement officer Gina Acosta and assistant chief Lemuel Antonio pointed to Col. Raymundo Dante Lachica as the right man to ask those questions.

If indeed Poa was an “abogadong walang alam” or someone who had no personal knowledge, why did the prosecution put him on the witness stand in the first place?

But the prosecution remained reluctant to present Lachica, keeping some senators wondering why, if at all, they really wanted to complete the narrative.

To date, the trial has remained “going in circles,” as Escudero so described.

When the trial took a lunch break, a television host, quoting some viewers, said the prosecution had a “lackluster” performance, the trial was chaotic, and that viewers opted to tune out of it.

Tolosa was part of the powerful ACCRA law firm before putting up his own, defending mining firms. He graduated from the University of Santo Tomas with an undergraduate degree in legal management in 2003, and finished law in the same institution in 2008.

He looked young, but it would be unfair to say he was too juvenile for a high-stakes political trial.

Commenting on Tolosa’s performance during a lunch break, Tolosa’s colleague, House prosecutor Joel Chua, said every lawyer has his own style of examining a witness.

“Lalo na yung mga bata,” said Chua in response to a reporter’s question that Tolosa had become combative. “They mellow as they age.”

Who indeed was the “abogadong walang alam”?

Better be careful with words next time.

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.