Years of courtroom instinct, not contempt, explain why lawyers seated at the front of the Senate impeachment court visibly reacted during Wednesday’s proceedings, private prosecutor Lorna Kapunan told reporters.
“Alam namin nakikita kami sa camera, trying to behave kami kasi you react as a lawyer,” Kapunan said at the press conference following Day 9 of the impeachment trial of Vice President Sara Duterte. “Kaniya, nakaganyan na lang ako, nagdadasal na lang ako para hindi maka-react.”
She rejected any suggestion that the front-row response was deliberate. “It is because… years of training, we instinctively react to what we think is wrong, or to what we think is unfair,” she said.
Kapunan had opened her remarks at the same briefing with an apology directed at Senator-judge Robin Padilla. “May I use this opportunity to apologize to Senator-judge Robin. There was no intent to disrespect him,” she said.
The stir traced back to a manifestation Padilla delivered late in the day’s session, when he told the House panel, “Sana hindi one-sided ang ating prosekusyon.” Manila Bulletin reported that the murmurs that followed prompted Presiding Officer Francis Escudero to direct the sergeant-at-arms to restore order in the chamber.
Padilla’s appeal came out of an exchange with lead prosecutor Batangas Rep. Gerville Luistro over witness credibility. According to The Filipino Times, the senator questioned the presentation of National Bureau of Investigation officials Jeremy Lotoc and Mark Calilung on grounds that they faced perjury cases — an assertion Luistro rejected, saying the panel had already verified that no cases were pending against them.
Asked about the same manifestation, Kapunan told reporters the adversarial design of the proceedings makes the complaint self-defeating. Both Rappler and the Philippine Daily Inquirer quoted Luistro saying it would be more surprising if the prosecution took a neutral posture, and stranger still if it argued on behalf of the respondent.
Kapunan described her colleague’s reply as diplomatic and suggested her own would have been blunter. The prosecution prosecutes and the defense defends, she said, calling it the nature of the beast.
