Daily Tribune Editorial
If Leonen knows what is right in the premises, he should inhibit himself from the Marcos-Robredo PET case.
There is something about Supreme Court Associate Justice Marvic Leonen that is very disturbing.
When Leonen was still a law student at the University of the Philippines, at a time when the assassination of ex-Senator Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino Jr. divided supporters of then President Ferdinand Marcos and the political opposition led by allies of the slain ex-senator, Leonen’s contemporaries saw him as both anti-Marcos and anti-Aquino.
Years later, however, Leonen became a close friend of President Benigno “Noynoy” Aquino III, enough to get himself appointed to the Supreme Court.
Politics does make strange bedfellows of many.
From the start of his assumption to office as a justice, Leonen liked to style himself as an independent-minded, pro-people magistrate. Lately, however, Leonen has been behaving in a manner far different from the way he likes to be publicly perceived.
When Solicitor General Jose Calida requested the Supreme Court for a copy of the latest statement of assets, liabilities and net worth (SALN) of Leonen, Calida’s request was flatly denied. News reports said Leonen himself categorically does not want to release his SALN to the public.
That was a puzzlement for Calida, considering that Leonen knows that the SALN is a public document, envisioned by the Constitution and by law as a publicly accessible material, and designed as a means for the public to monitor the lifestyle of high-ranking government officials.
In a commentary published in this newspaper on 31 October 2020, it was suggested that Leonen does not want the public to access his SALN because the good magistrate probably has something to hide. After all, one who has nothing to hide should not be afraid to allow the public scrutiny of his SALN.
The latest controversy involving Leonen concerns the election protest filed by 2016 vice presidential candidate and ex-Senator Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. against the incumbent veep, Leni Robredo. It has been pending for the longest time before the Supreme Court sitting as the Presidential Electoral Tribunal (PET).
Marcos Jr. and Calida have asked Leonen to inhibit himself from any further participation in the resolution of the election protest, because of Leonen’s prior public pronouncements and social media commentaries against the late president and his administration. For them, Leonen has either pre-judged the case or has ceased to be an impartial magistrate on account of those past public pronouncements and commentaries.
Jurisprudence says that in the interest of the fair and impartial administration of justice, parties to a litigation are entitled to nothing less than “the cold neutrality of an impartial judge,” and that it is not enough that a judge or justice is impartial; he must also be publicly perceived as impartial.
From those premises, therefore, Marcos Jr. and Calida cannot be faulted for seeking the inhibition of Leonen from the election protest pending in the PET.
Leonen is probably unaware of the judicial tradition that a justice of the Supreme Court should avoid making public statements about political issues. That’s because there is the possibility that the issue concerned may eventually end up in a case to be resolved in the Supreme Court. By observing that restraint, a justice can avoid being suspected by the litigants and the public of having pre-judged the issue he is expected to resolve as a jurist.
That explains why in earlier times, like during the incumbency of Chief Justice Roberto Concepcion, the Supreme Court did not have any spokesman, the premise being that the Supreme Court speaks to the public only through its decisions.
Leonen’s current predicament is the consequence of his own doing.
He is very vocal and opinionated about political issues as seen in his social media site, in defiance of the judicial tradition of restraint.
His views and opinions of President Marcos and anyone and anything associated with Marcos have been so scalding, political analysts suspect that his vote on the PET case is certain to be against Marcos Jr.
If Leonen knows what is right in the premises, he should inhibit himself from the Marcos-Robredo PET case. The legal signage points in that direction.