We welcome the call of retired Supreme Court Justice Arturo Brion to correct the injustice done to the late Chief Justice Renato Corona by lawmakers during the Aquino administration, and urge the incoming legislators to do their share to right an egregious wrong.
Brion this week appealed to members of the incoming 18th Congress to pass a measure that would grant the heirs of Corona the retirement and other benefits deprived him due to his ouster by impeachment in 2012.
Brion, a colleague of the late chief justice, lamented that Corona did not receive any retirement benefit because of his ouster by members of Congress.
“His family continues to be denied the retirement benefits that deceased members of the judiciary can leave to their families. Congress can remedy this situation if it wants to, not by resurrecting the dead and buried impeachment case, but by legislating a financial grant that is within its authority to give…to pay the equivalent of the retirement pay and the benefits the late chief justice would have left behind,” he said.
“The late chief justice mercifully died three years ago, carrying his underserved impeachment taint to the grave. This is the injustice our newly elected national officials shall soon face. Unless they act, the injustice done to the chief justice shall forever serve as a towering monument of how the misdeeds of the Aquino administration triumphed,” Brion added.
Brion recalled that Corona was impeached after the Court under his watch ordered the distribution of land to farmers of the Hacienda Luisita owned by former President Benigno Aquino III and also voided the truth commission that was supposed to investigate corruption charges against former President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo.
He also cited the reported admission by former Senator Jinggoy Estrada and returning Senator Ramon Revilla Jr. that they were bribed by the previous administration to vote for Corona’s ouster during impeachment trial in the Senate by offering millions of Disbursement Acceleration Program funds, which the Supreme Court later on declared unconstitutional.
Brion said Estrada claimed that Aquino “had used pork barrel funds to bribe the senators in 2012 in his campaign to impeach the late chief justice.”
Corona was removed from office in May 2012 after an impeachment trial in the Senate for betrayal of public trust over failure to disclose his assets in his statement of assets, liabilities and net worth. He died in April 2016, after being hounded by a vindictive administration that was not satisfied by his ouster, but dogged him to his final days with tax evasion cases.
Mr. Aquino, who squandered government resources and his political capital to persecute Corona, replaced him with a friendlier chief justice, Ma. Lourdes Sereno. That injustice has already been corrected with Sereno’s ouster in 2018 through a quo warranto decision by her own colleagues in the Supreme Court. The least the incoming 18th Congress is to make right the injustice still being suffered by the late chief justice’s family.
