DOJ asks court to junk
anew Trillanes’motion for leave

THE Department of Justice (DOJ) yesterday asked a Makati court to junk the motion filed by detained opposition senator Antonio Trillanes IV seeking the reversal of an earlier ruling dismissing his petition to attend Senate sessions and for access to the media.

State prosecutor Richard Anthony Fadullon petitioned Judge Oscar Pimentel of Makati regional trial court branch 148 to dismiss Trillanes’ motion for reconsideration for "utter lack of merit."

"The defense has utterly failed to show why this Honorable Court should just parrot the contemporary examples of cases involving political personalities similarly charged with non-bailable offenses and how the Courts have been treating them. Contemporary examples are not precedents as this is a legal venue and not a political one," said the DOJ’s motion.

Trillanes has cited in this motion the cases of former President Joseph Estrada and former Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao chairman Nur Misuari who are both under house arrest, the former while on trial for the crime of plunder and the former for rebellion. His motion said he is entitled to the same treatment under the constitutional guarantee of equal protection of the law.

Fadullon insisted that the proper precedent is the 2000 Supreme Court ruling rejecting a similar petition filed by Zamboanga del Norte Rep. Romeo Jalosjos who was reelected to Congress while waiting for his conviction on statutory rape charges to become final.

Fadullon said the case of the late Cagayan governor Rodolfo Aguinaldo is not applicable to Trillanes’ case either. "In the Aguinaldo case, the Supreme Court sustained the petitioner’s argument that he cannot be administratively removed by the Department of the Interior and Local Government for his participation in a failed coup attempt in 1989 before he was re-elected to his second term of office as governor of Cagayan," Fadullon explained.