The prosecution’s handling of Vice President Sara Duterte’s impeachment case drew scrutiny from senator-judges on Tuesday, July 07, 2026, when several of them questioned whether the House panel had jumped ahead to arguing its conclusions rather than simply laying out evidence.
At the center of the friction was a question from Senator-Judge Risa Hontiveros, who pressed private prosecutor Amando Virgil Ligutan on why Duterte’s reported threats against President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. should be treated as an impeachable offense. Ligutan responded that the conduct fell outside anything the country had seen from a sitting Vice President.
“Even without going into a question: ‘Is that a criminal act?’ That act, 110 percent sure, betrayed the public trust that the Vice President got in the previous elections,” he said.
Presiding Officer Francis “Chiz” Escudero stepped in to note that Hontiveros had effectively raised the ultimate matter the entire court would eventually have to settle, and he opened the floor for Duterte’s defense to answer the same point with equal time. The prosecutor’s remarks, Escudero said, amounted to legal and factual conclusions that the court should weigh only when the time came to decide.
“Statements were made by the counsel of the prosecutor that are conclusions of fact and law already, which should be taken upon advisement of the Impeachment Court,” he said.
Senator-Judge Pia Cayetano took a sharper line, telling the presiding officer that Ligutan had delivered what was essentially a closing statement and asking that the court intervene when questions strayed from proper bounds.
“Because it is not right. We must follow the rules, and I know you are being courteous to all of us, but that was a closing statement,” she said. “Do not take advantage of the generosity of this impeachment court.”
She then moved to have the remark removed from the record, though Escudero set the motion aside for a later ruling.
Hontiveros, for her part, explained that she had been probing how the evidence connects to the specific allegations in the Articles of Impeachment, given that nothing so far demonstrated Duterte had actually contracted a killer. Provoking a closing argument, she said, was never her aim.
The exchange grew out of evidence entered earlier through NBI agent John Mark Calilung, who read into the record Duterte’s Oct. 18, 2024 remarks describing her already “toxic” dealings with the President. In that statement she spoke of imagining the “beheading” of Marcos and of digging up the remains of the late former President Ferdinand Marcos Sr. to cast them into the West Philippine Sea. Prosecutors also played a segment of her Nov. 23, 2024 online press conference, which ran more than two hours, in which she claimed to have instructed someone to kill Marcos, First Lady Liza Araneta-Marcos, and former House Speaker Martin Romualdez should she herself be killed first.
