Retired Supreme Court Associate Justice Adolfo Azcuna is not backing away from his assessment that House prosecutors have demonstrated the criminal intent underpinning the grave threat charge against Vice President Sara Duterte.
Azcuna located the decisive moment in an exchange during cross-examination. He pointed to Senator-judge Alan Peter Cayetano’s questioning of National Bureau of Investigation special agent John Mark Calilung, who told the court that investigators had weighed the gravity of the threat against Duterte’s actual ability to act on it.
For Azcuna, that framing is what matters legally. “It is my understanding of case law that how the threat was received by the persons threatened, including naturally by those mandated to protect them, is one of the ways of judging the intent behind the threat,” he said.
The threat in question dates to Duterte’s November 2024 remarks, in which she said she had arranged for an assassin to kill the President, the First Lady and the House speaker in the event of her own death. Azcuna, speaking to Bilyonaryo News Channel the previous week, described the intent behind those statements as established.
He was careful to draw a line, though. Proving intent, he stressed, is not the same as a conviction — it simply moves the burden to Duterte’s defense to answer.
Over the weekend, Azcuna also used his statement to knock down inaccurate claims about himself that had spread online. “I am not the sitting chancellor of the Philippine Judicial Academy. I retired from that position in 2021. Neither am I a grandmaster in chess. I am only a chess lover and enthusiast although sometimes capable of being a worthy adversary,” he said.
House prosecutor and ML party-list Rep. Leila de Lima offered a parallel read on the trial’s first week, arguing the defense had gained nothing from its cross-examination of the same NBI witness. “Nothing was ever broken in any part of agent Calilung’s testimony under the crucibles or the test of cross-examination, because the cross-examination is a stress test. And therefore if the evidence remains stellar, then it only shows the case became even stronger,” she told reporters.
De Lima went further on the video at the center of the case, contending the defense itself had settled the authenticity question. “As far as we are concerned, there is no more debate there. No less than the defense panel have shown that the video is authentic. Why did they show portions of the same video if they didn’t believe it was authentic?” she said.
The prosecution’s evidentiary lineup continues this week. Capt. Belinda Bello, who directs the House legislative security bureau, is expected to testify, having been party to discussions over the possible jailing and transfer of Duterte chief of staff Zuleika Lopez to the Correctional Institution for Women — the sequence of events that set off the Vice President’s outburst.
NBI regional director Jeremy Lotoc is also slated to appear, and De Lima said his account would reinforce and extend Calilung’s findings. “He will both be corroborating as well as adding certain aspects to the testimony of Agent Calilung, most especially on the investigation and the results, which became the basis and also conclusion on why they forwarded the case to the Department of Justice,” she explained.
