Lawyers and legal ethics
WITHIN a month’s time, there will again be gnashing of teeth for many and rejoicing for some, when the Supreme Court releases the results of last year’s Bar exams. In the past, only about a quarter of the examinees pass; hence, I mentioned “gnashing” ahead of “rejoicing” in describing the Bar’s aftermath. Together with the examinees and their loved ones, we are again wishing and hoping, as in the past, that the reverse will happen this year.
Going back a month this time, lawyers were once more in the limelight (as they usually are), not necessarily as members of the Bar, although their persona as law professionals was markedly evident. Those of us who watch the Senate investigations will remember the lively and informative exchanges among the lawyers during the Senate hearing on the allegations of corruption at the Bureau of Immigration (BI). There was the Senate Committee chair, Senator Dick Gordon, who dominated the proceedings with his firm rulings and his apt and timely quips; Justice Secretary Vitaliano Aguirre who showed his mastery of the law, but who at one point pleaded failure of memory on recent events; Senator Leila de Lima who, as always, was feisty and equally adept in the give-and-take of legal debates; former BI Commissioners Al Argosino and Michael Robles, both lawyers, who were alleged to be extortionists rather than bribe recipients; and the parties’ counsel, among them, Atty. Raymond Fortun.
Senator De Lima was separately in the news on another development – for having been charged and arrested for drug violations during her stint as justice secretary. Solicitor General Jose Calida was not to be left behind after he recommended the acquittal of Janet Napoles, on appeal, after the trial court convicted her of serious illegal detention. These developments left the legal ranks abuzz with theories and speculations on the legal issues they raised.
(Of more recent vintage are the impeachment charges against our President, the Vice President, and the Ombudsman, all of them lawyers. But these are altogether separate topics for another time.)
From foreign shores, in the news at about the same time as the BI hearing, was the conviction of the vice president of the highest Chinese court for graft for taking bribes in exchange for “assisting individuals and organizations with their cases and companies with their entry into the market.” For those with intimate knowledge of the Philippine legal and judicial circles, this piece of news would sound familiar, but with a difference: Hardly anybody at that rarefied judicial level is caught, much less convicted, in the Philippines.
Interestingly, it was a non-lawyer who brought home the point of commonality among the dramatis personae in the Gordon Committee hearing. Senator Rissa Hontiveros asked the justice secretary whether he had conducted himself in accordance with the Code of Judicial Conduct in this affair, to which the SOJ nimbly retorted: I am not a judge and the code applies only to judges.
Very elementary, a second-year law student would say, but the good senator’s wrongly cited code nevertheless highlighted that underlying the BI developments is ethical conduct or, in the language of the legal curriculum, LEGAL ETHICS – that body of rules that govern the relationships of lawyers with the courts, with his clients, with his colleagues in the Bar, and with the public.
Did the central focus of the investigation – the two former commissioners who had been accused of extortion – commit breaches of legal ethics for which they should be penalized if found guilty? Did the DOJ secretary, who had allegedly been asked to be a gambling operator’s godfather and who did not immediately act on the illegal proposition, commit a similar breach? Did he act ethically in his dealings with the former BI commissioners who are his fraternity brothers? Can a resourceful complainant glean ethical violations from the charges Senator De Lima is now facing?
To date, the BI corruption affair has yet to enter its formal criminal and administrative stages, although the President has announced the dismissal of the two BI commissioners from their positions. But here and now and separately from these potential cases, the nation is faced with the related general ethical question: Why and how do things go wrong for ethically errant lawyers who should be society’s exemplars in complying with the law?
The Supreme Court supervises the Integrated Bar of the Philippines and as a background for these discussions, I went back to my records on how lawyers fared in legal ethics in the immediate past. I found that for the years 2012 to 2016 (or, roughly, since Chief Justice Ma. Lourdes Sereno became chief justice), the court disbarred 40 lawyers, suspended 224 from the practice of law, suspended 33 from both the practice of law and notarial practice, and suspended 11 from notarial practice. From the judicial ranks, from 2010 to 2016, the court dismissed from the service one Sandiganbayan justice, 16 regional trial court judges, nine municipal trial court level judges, and one Shari’a circuit court judge.
On top of all these, 13 regional trial court judges were suspended, while nine suffered the same fate at the municipal trial court level; many more were fined, reprimanded, or warned for their ethical breaches. Based on the number of disciplinary cases now pending with the court and with the IBP, there appears to be an epidemic of ethical breaches by the people whom the public entrusts with legal problems involving their lives, liberty, and property.
Lawyers violate their ethical code for many reasons. Among them are the cultural, educational, societal, and the political ones. Of course, among the top reasons is personal – greed. For lack of space, I shall reserve for my next articles my discussions of these reasons, of legal ethics in general, of the Supreme Court as the disciplinary authority, and of my views on the way forward.
In the meanwhile, I would like to invite the reading public to share with me their experiences and thoughts on the topic – lawyers and legal ethics. I am sure there are many and we will do the public a service if we share them with one another. Even Shakespeare in his Henry VI play left us his own take when one of the characters said: “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.”
We lawyers have indeed been an interesting lot.