For a non-lawyer, Marites Dañguilan-Vitug appears to know more
about the inner workings of the Supreme Court than most lawyers. Those who do
not know her history may think she is a Janie-come-lately, choosing to write
about the court system only because of the two libel suits filed against her by
an incumbent Associate Justice (the two suits have since been withdrawn). But Vitug is certainly no
Janie-come-lately as far as probing into official narratives designed to
conceal the truth; well before it was safe to be an investigative journalist,
she was one in a very short list of women and men who would give that
description much credibility.
Her passion and pre-occupation at making the courts of the
land better places for justice to take root are clear in the way she has
doggedly probed and pried open, questioned and challenged existing and enduring
traditions of secrecy and confidentiality that the courts, particularly the
Supreme Court, have hidden behind. That same passion and preoccupation have put
her at odds with Court Administrators and Chief Justices; these have also
brought her to the unfamiliar legal terra
firma of facing two libel suits brought by a former Court Administrator and
current Associate Justice.
Marites Dañguilan-Vitug has done the country and the legal
profession a signal service by shining a light into the Court’s decision-making
processes through well-researched, sharply dissected and clearly written
narratives, accounts and vignettes, threaded together into one compelling
narrative.
In “Hour before dawn”, the second book of what appears now
to be at least a trilogy, Marites Dañguilan-Vitug’s voice is clearly more
confident now than in her first book on the Supreme Court, the runaway
bestseller “Shadow of doubt.” Two
years removed from “Shadow…”, she picks up the narrative from the thread that
“Shadow…” left dangling—the plan to make Renato Corona Chief Justice, in
violation of the Constitution. By choosing to start “Hour before dawn” with the
midnight appointment of Renato Corona as Chief Justice of the Philippines and
ending it with her interview of the President as he is about to choose a new
Chief Justice, Vitug so aptly bookends the narrative with the indelible images
of the onset of midnight and the breaking of dawn.
Corona’s shadow is cast long, deep and wide over the book.
The “fall” in the title of the book is traced to the “original sin” that was
the midnight appointment. Vitug, however, refuses to yield to the temptation to just let the “original sin” be
the only narrative; to do so would have been a simple matter of blaming the one
who appointed him and put Corona as one who simply accepted what, to many,
would have been an irresistible gift. Instead, she looks into the man who
played an indispensable role in the fall of the Court, into his ways of
thinking and acting and into those who influenced and continue to influence him;
she casts him not as a man thrust by circumstance but as one who took part in
shaping the circumstances that led to his taking the center seat on the Court.
The stories she tells may, at first, appear unrelated to
each other but after reading the narrative that runs on a single thread—Renato
Corona—Vitug shows the impact of the “original sin” on the fall of the Court.
The flip-flopping in the League of Cities
case, the closing of ranks against the UP Law 37 in the contempt incident
arising from the plagiarism accusation against Justice Mariano Del Castillo and
the investigation by the Court that created more questions than provided
answers, the letter-writing by counsel for Philippine Air Lines that led to a
reversal of what was already a win in favor of FASAP—these and other stories
are bound by Vitug, with her insistence on facts, her clarity of prose, her
creative use of dialogue, and her passion for the subject, into a very
compelling account of just how the Court had fallen and just how far it had
fallen.
Aptly culminating the narrative with the trial and the
removal of the former Chief Justice and teasing her readers with the
possibility of the Court’s rise from the fall because of the then-imminent
appointment of a new Chief Justice, Vitug ends “Hour before dawn”in the same
way she ended “Shadow of doubt”—with a thread dangling: the appointment of a
new Chief Justice. But unlike “Shadow…”, which ended on a rather pessimistic
note of then-Congressman Defensor planning Corona’s midnight appointment,
“Hour…” ends on a note of cautious optimism and, dare I say, guarded hope. Her
interview with the President is a fitting epilogue to this chronicle of the
fall and hopeful rise of the Court.
With the appointment of Chief Justice Maria Lourdes Sereno
and the inordinately heavy burden placed on her shoulder by the President, I am
almost certain that Marites Danguilan-Vitug’s next book on the Court will start
with the President’s appointment of the Chief Justice and, still, a critical
and independent examination of the relationship between Court and Executive,
Chief Justice and President—two fascinating characters who are both similar and
different in many respects.
It is always darkest before the dawn and that is what
Vitug’s title conveys. It remains to be seen if, indeed, the light has come for
the judiciary in the Philippines and particularly the Supreme Court. That is
the burden of Chief Justice Sereno but also, in a very real sense, our
burden--to ensure that transparency, accountability and genuine reform are
brought about in the judiciary, from selection to retirement. Vitug’s
chronicles of the Court are brave attempts to do just that—to usher in the
onset of light and the many possibilities of hope.