By now most everybody should already have a clear idea of
what “impeachment” means. In the ongoing proceedings against Philippine Chief
Justice Renato C. Corona, it means “charging a public official before a
competent tribunal with misconduct with the view of removing him or her from
office.” In this sense, from a layperson’s standpoint, Chief Justice Corona’s
impeachment was “a done thing” when the House of Representatives endorsed eight
articles of impeachment against him by an overwhelming majority last December 12,
and what we have been witnessing for over four months now in the Senate
impeachment tribunal is the prosecution’s efforts to have him convicted for his
alleged impeachable misconduct.
I would have left this matter with nary a comment except
that last Wednesday, while my son Ed and I watched the impeachment trial on
cable TV, one of the defense counsels, Dennis Manalo, made this statement while
cross-examining a witness: “If the witness your honor is so declared as
hostile, we will impeach this witness… by proving his bias and prejudice
against Chief Justice Corona and his active involvement in a well-planned and
orchestrated effort to destroy the reputation of Chief Justice Corona…”
At this juncture my son Ed turned to me and said: “Wait,
Dad, didn’t the defense lawyer make a colossal word-choice blunder just now? He
said he will impeach the witness, but how could that be? Has he forgotten that
it’s his client—Chief Justice Corona—who has been impeached and is the one on
trial in this case?”
“No, son,” I explained. “That defense lawyer’s choice of the
verb ‘impeach’ is actually precise and calculated, except that he used the word
in another sense—‘to cast doubt on or to challenge the credibility or validity
of the testimony of a witness.’ That’s definition #2 of ‘impeach’ by our online
Merriam-Webster’s 11th Collegiate
Dictionary.”
“Well, shouldn’t he have used another word to avoid
confusing laypeople like me? Perhaps ‘discredit’ would have been much clearer.”
“Yes, absolutely! But you see, ‘discredit’ isn’t a legal
term; ‘impeach’ is the precise legal term for what lawyers would want to do to an
adverse witness.”
This confusion
over the dual meaning of “impeach” brings to mind this related comment posted
in Jose Carillo’s English Forum recently by member Eduardo (Jay) Olaguer about
an apparently imprecise legal usage: “I’m so tired of hearing Filipino
newspapers refer to judges or lawmakers as ‘inhibiting’ themselves, meaning
that they withdraw from participating in a decision due to a conflict of
interest. Why don’t they use the word ‘recuse’ instead of ‘inhibit’? Those who
recuse themselves are known as ‘recusants,’ like the English Catholics who
withdrew from attending Anglican ‘masses’ during the English Reformation.”
I agreed with Ed that “recuse” is the more precise word for that
particular act of self-disqualification by a judge owing to conflict of
interest. Indeed, my Merriam-Webster’s 11th
Collegiate defines the transitive verb “recuse” as “to disqualify (oneself)
as judge in a particular case” and, more broadly, “to remove (oneself) from
participation to avoid a conflict of interest.” In contrast, it defines the
verb “inhibit” in the general sense as “to prohibit from doing something” or
“to hold in check.” And in English law, from what I can gather, “inhibition” is
“the name of a writ which forbids a judge from further proceeding in a cause
depending before him; it is in the nature of a prohibition.” In civil law, on
the other hand, it is “the prohibition which the law makes, or a judge ordains
to an individual.” The element of self-disqualification is absent in both
definitions.
It’s abundantly clear, however, that even without the
element of self-disqualification, the verb “inhibit” has gained more traction
than “recuse” in Philippine legal language, so I guess we’ll just have to stick
to our own home-grown sense of “inhibit.” (May 19, 2012)
---------------
This essay earlier appeared
in the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in the May 19, 2012 issue of The
Manila Times © 2012 by The Manila Times. All rights reserved.
