Impeachment Court Presiding Officer Sen. Francis Escudero voted against lowering the conviction threshold in Vice President Sara Duterte’s impeachment trial and maintained his earlier ruling that 16 votes are needed for conviction based on the Constitution.
Escudero was the lone vote against revising the threshold, which was supported by 13 members.
Under the new interpretation, senators who are legally or factually unable to participate would be excluded from the denominator when determining the two-thirds vote.
Escudero maintained that the constitutional provision requiring a two-thirds vote of all members for a conviction must be given its plain and literal meaning.
“The Chair finds no basis in the constitutional text for interpreting it otherwise,” he said.
He said the word “present” when referring to the senators voting in the impeachment trial was intentionally omitted from the 1935 Constitution and was never restored in the 1973 or 1987 Constitutions.
“In other words, the word ‘present’ was intentionally omitted and has remained absent from our Constitution ever since. What the Constitution has omitted, for me, cannot now be restored by interpretation,” he said.
He also said that even if a senator is absent or incapacitated, it does not change the fact that the Senate has 24 members.
Escudero also said lowering the denominator would make conviction easier to secure than acquittal, which the framers of the Constitution could not have intended.
“The conviction threshold falls 13 times, while the acquittal threshold falls only seven times. In other words, a variable denominator makes it easier to secure a judgement of conviction compared to a judgement of acquittal,” he said.
The fourth reason he cited is that any genuine doubt must be resolved in favor of the accused, citing the principle of “in dubio pro reo.”
He said conviction should not be made easier by implication or inference when constitutional doubt remains.
“Terminating an elected mandate before the end of its term is among the most drastic acts our constitutional democracy can undertake. Therefore, when the Constitution fixes the conditions and number for imposing a judgment of conviction, those conditions should not be relaxed by implication, nor should the number rise or fall according to the contingencies of the day,” he said.
Escudero also said the ruling to lower the threshold applies only to Duterte’s impeachment trial and does not bind future impeachment proceedings.
“This has never happened before, and the Chair hopes that it shall never happen again,” he said.