Sara Duterte trial: Prosecution calls defense 'nitpickers'

MANILA, Philippines – The prosecution team in the impeachment trial of Vice President Sara Duterte accused the defense team of nitpicking due to the line of questioning it pursued during the cross-examination of National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao Regional Director Jeremy Lotoc. When defense lawyer Mark Vinluan questioned Lotoc, the prosecution’s second witness, the former spent a significant amount of time pointing out typographical errors, as well as inconsistencies in dates and docketing numbers, in NBI documents that were submitted to the Department of Justice for preliminary case buildup. The defense team’s apparent strategy was to show that the NBI’s probe into the threats made by the Vice President against President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. during the infamous virtual press conference on November 23, 2024, was sloppy. “Is that the best you can do? Maybe you should do a little bit better. Even if they raised document discrepancies on the cross-examination, it did not diminish the threat itself,” House prosecutor Terry Ridon said in a press conference on Tuesday, July 14. Duterte ran with the “fabricated evidence” narrative in her statement, also on Tuesday, prompting prosecution spokesperson Renee Co to fight back. “Did we watch the same impeachment trial? We feel that we are not just ghosted, but gaslit, because the whole nation watched the video,” Co said. After Tuesday’s cross-examination by the defense, private prosecutor Amando Virgil Ligutan gave Lotoc the opportunity to say that the documentary flaws were immaterial to the case. “Those typographical errors do not alter the fact that the video exists, that the Vice President uttered those statements, and our NBI findings that showed the evidence was indeed complete and that she committed grave threats and inciting to sedition,” Lotoc said. Impeachable offense The defense team, during cross-examination, tried to argue that grave threats and inciting to sedition — the acts cited by the House in its fourth impeachment article against Duterte — are felonies but do not amount to impeachable offenses. When it was the prosecution’s time for redirect examination, Ligutan’s penultimate question to Lotoc was whether or not Duterte betrayed public trust when she threatened the President. Lotoc answered in the affirmative. The former chief of the NBI cybercrime division pointed to a media interview given by Duterte three days after the online press conference, in which she reiterated the threat she made against Marcos without denying it. The prosecution played an excerpt of the video during the trial. The November 26, 2024, media interview was also the utterance that Lotoc cited when asked by Senator-judge JV Ejercito if the NBI considered Duterte’s November 23 threat as a comment made “”in the heat of the moment.” “When we tried to connect the November 23 event to the November 26 utterances, it shows that the Vice President was not joking when she made the utterances on November 23,” Lotoc said during a redirect examination by Ligutan. What’s next The prosecution was supposed to call Office of the Vice President chief of staff Zuleika Lopez to the witness stand after Lotoc, but it decided to withdraw its request. It said that her role in the trial had already been satisfied when the defense team admitted that Duterte uttered the threat. Lopez was physically with Duterte at the former’s detention cell in the House in November 2024 when the Vice President confessed that she had hired a hitman to kill the President if something bad were to happen to her. Because the prosecution dropped Lopez, as well as House security officer Belinda Bello, from its witness list, the sixth day of the trial on Wednesday, July 15, will be spent on oral arguments on whether the court should subpoena Duterte’s financial records. Must Read Prosecutors justify Sara Duterte bank records request as ‘unedited truth’ – Rappler.com