THE House prosecution won two procedural motions Wednesday after the Senate impeachment court granted its requests to take judicial notice of previous House proceedings and transfer exhibit markings for portions of the affidavit of self-confessed former Davao Death Squad (DDS) member Arturo Lascañas.
In both rulings, however, the court stressed that it was not passing upon the truth of the allegations against Vice President Sara Z. Duterte or the admissibility and evidentiary weight of the underlying evidence.
The impeachment court, through Presiding Officer Sen. Francis “Chiz” Escudero, granted the prosecution’s motion for judicial notice of the existence and official character of the proceedings of the House Committee on Good Government and Public Accountability and the House Committee on Justice.
The Good Government panel conducted a series of inquiries in 2024 into the alleged misuse of confidential funds by the Office of the Vice President and the Department of Education under Duterte.
The Justice panel, meanwhile, heard the verified impeachment complaints before endorsing the articles of impeachment to the House plenary, which impeached Duterte and transmitted the case to the Senate for trial.
The ruling covers the official transcripts, audiovisual recordings and committee report generated from those proceedings.
Escudero said the court was recognizing only that the hearings were officially conducted and that the records exist as official documents.
He emphasized that the ruling does not establish the truth of any testimony, allegation, finding or conclusion contained in those records.
The presiding officer also reminded the prosecution that judicial notice is not a substitute for presenting and formally offering evidence and does not dispense with the rules on authentication, hearsay, relevance and Duterte’s right to challenge the evidence against her.
In a separate ruling, Escudero denied defense objection to the prosecution’s request to transfer exhibit markings from provisional copies to certified true copies of portions of the Lascañas affidavit.
The affidavit surfaced earlier in the trial during the testimony of National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) Director Melvin Matibag.
Matibag identified it as one of the materials reviewed during the bureau’s open-source investigation into Vice President Sara Z. Duterte’s alleged threats against President Ferdinand R. Marcos Jr., First Lady Liza Araneta-Marcos and former Speaker Ferdinand Martin G. Romualdez.
According to Matibag, investigators considered the document as part of their assessment of what prosecutors describe as a pattern of violence allegedly involving Duterte.
The affidavit contains allegations linking her to the infamous DDS and extrajudicial killings.
Escudero recalled that the prosecution had represented that the affidavit was presented only to establish that it formed part of the NBI’s investigation, not to prove the truth of its contents.
He said transferring the exhibit markings was merely a procedural step to maintain the orderly identification of court records and did not amount to a ruling on the affidavit’s authenticity, admissibility or evidentiary value.
Escudero also stressed that the purported affidavit remains unsigned, unauthenticated and unsworn, and that no witness has attested to its execution or the truth of its contents.
The senator warned that neither ruling may be used to suggest that the impeachment court had accepted the truth of the House proceedings or the Lascañas affidavit.
Escudero said those matters remain subject to proof, objection and the court’s independent evaluation at the appropriate stage of the trial.
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