Philippine Court Panel Says Marcos ‘Scripted’ Trial in Aquino Slaying

A special Supreme Court commission said Thursday that former President Ferdinand E. Marcos personally “scripted” and “stage-managed” last year’s acquittal of the 25 military personnel charged with assassinating the husband of President Corazon Aquino in 1983. The three-member commission recommended that a mistrial be declared.

The commission’s 62-page report, which must still be acted upon formally by the nation’s 10-member Supreme Court, was based on 19 days of hearings, the testimony of seven key witnesses and 340 documents.

The commission concluded that the evidence “showed clearly” that Marcos was personally responsible for “suppression of vital evidence,” “harassment of witnesses,” “coaching of defense counsels” and “even the very decision rendered in the case.”

‘Murder of the Century’

The commission’s ruling was viewed by many legal experts here as the first step toward implicating Marcos in the assassination of former Sen. Benigno S. Aquino Jr., a crime dubbed by many in Manila “the murder of the century.”

The commission, made up of three retired justices, was created by the Supreme Court in June to determine whether there was enough evidence of tampering to reopen the three-year-old murder case against some of Marcos’ most trusted military aides.

In an interview shortly after the commission released its findings Thursday, Supreme Court Chief Justice Claudio Teehankee said that, if his high court accepts the report, it would require a retrial of all the accused. These include Gen. Fabian C. Ver, Marcos’ military chief of staff and his most-trusted aide before the regime fell Feb. 25, when Marcos and close associates, including Ver, fled to Hawaii.

Teehankee, who was appointed to the court by President Aquino with the nine other justices earlier this year, also said the court would be allowed to include additional defendants in any future retrial of a murder case that many political experts have said marked the beginning of the end of Marcos’ 20 years in power.

Marcos could presumably be among those charged, perhaps as an accessory for obstruction of justice, said attorney Raul Gonzales, who would prosecute the cases if they are retried. It is considered unlikely, however, that the Aquino government would try to extradite him from the United States.

Killed Amid Troops

Benigno S. Aquino Jr. was returning to Manila after three years in exile in the United States when he was shot to death on the tarmac of Manila International Airport on Aug. 21, 1983. Aquino was surrounded by nearly 2,000 heavily armed government troops at the time.

Aquino’s widow has led the nation’s political opposition in charging that Marcos was personally responsible for the killing.

The assassination became a key issue in the presidential campaign between Marcos and Corazon Aquino. Marcos was declared the winner of the February election, which was deeply marred by widespread fraud, vote-buying and military intimidation.

But Marcos’ government collapsed three weeks later in the face of a coup led by his defense minister, Juan Ponce Enrile, who has also said privately that he suspects the former president was involved in the Aquino case.

Since coming to power in the wake of the coup that drove Marcos into exile, Aquino has vowed that her husband’s murder would be treated no differently than the hundreds of other cases of the human rights violations that allegedly were committed during the Marcos regime.

Marcos Denied Involvement

Marcos has publicly denied any involvement in the Aquino slaying.

Within hours of the assassination, Marcos announced on government television that Aquino had been killed not by soldiers but by Rolando Galman, a hit man hired by the Communist Party of the Philippines. Galman was shot by soldiers immediately after the opposition leader was slain.

“It was, therefore, not a source of wonder that President Marcos would want the case disposed of in a manner consistent with his announced theory, which, at the same time, would clear his name and his administration of any suspected guilty participation in the assassination,” said the commission’s report, adding that the case “had stirred unprecedented public outcry and wide international attention.”

So great was Marcos’ involvement in the case, the commission said, that he saw to it that “adverse witnesses were harassed, cajoled, perjured or threatened either to refrain from testifying or to testify in a manner favorable to the defense.”

During the nine-month trial, at least two key prosecution witnesses disappeared and are now feared dead, the report noted. Another, a Japanese journalist who accompanied Aquino on the plane, was also shot at during a later visit to Manila and was twice deported from the country to prevent his testimony in the trial, and a third potential witness, a woman who says she actually saw a soldier kill Aquino, was threatened several times, the commission said.

Offered Payoff

The woman’s home was ransacked, the mortgage on the house was foreclosed by a government bank and, ultimately, she was offered two million pesos ($100,000) by a top Marcos lieutenant to keep her from testifying, the commission found.

“Sufficient evidence has been ventilated to show a scripted and predetermined manner of handling and disposing of the Aquino-Galman murder case, as stage-managed from Malacanang (the presidential palace) and performed by willing dramatis personnae, as well as by recalcitrant ones whipped into line by the omnipresent influence of an authoritarian ruler,” the commission concluded.

At the heart of the commission’s findings was the testimony of Manuel Herrera, 62, the chief government prosecutor in the case.

Herrera told the commission last month that on Jan. 10, 1985, he and the entire team of government prosecutors assigned to the case were summoned by Marcos to the presidential palace. There, he said, a tired and ill Marcos sat behind a small table in his pajamas and slippers and dictated to them how the case should be handled.

Herrera testified that, during the conference, Marcos selected the judge who would hear the case, ordered that the defendants be released on bail and directed the prosecutors to rewrite the criminal indictment they had prepared, reducing the charges against several of the defendants--among them Ver--from first-degree murder to being accessories to the crime.

No Doubt of Marcos’ Aim

“Although he (Marcos) did not directly say, ‘You acquit this, you convict this,’ there was no doubt that he wanted all of the (defendants) in the double murder case to be acquitted, so that they can benefit by the principle of double jeopardy,” the commission report stated.

“The instructions given in the Malacanang conference were followed to the letter,” the report added, concluding that such interference alone accounted for sufficient “lack of due process” that the proceedings be declared a mistrial.

Justice Teehankee said in the interview that such a finding, if accepted by the Supreme Court, effectively means that Aquino’s accused killers would no longer be permitted to use as a defense the constitutional principle of double jeopardy, which protects defendants from being tried twice for the same crime.