Today I have no choice on what to write about – it is Erap’s conviction and nothing else. It is the biggest and most significant court case our republic has ever experienced since our founding and probably for the centuries to come.

On trial was former President Estrada, his son and incumbent senator Jinggoy Estrada and lawyer, Edward Serapio for the crime of plunder and another case of perjury against President Estrada. President Erap alone was convicted of plunder; all the other charges were dismissed.

The plunder law is a relatively new penal law in our statute books. It was passed in 1991 as a reaction to the excesses during the Marcos regime. Ironic that then Senator Estrada voted favourably for the passage of the law and now his conviction under it. He knew and studied this law. One more instance of truth stranger than fiction.

Plunder, simplified, is committed by any public officer who, by himself or in connivance with members of his family, relatives, business associates, subordinates or other persons, amasses, accumulates or acquires ill-gotten wealth through a combination or series of overt or criminal acts of misappropriation, misuse, or conversion of public funds or by taking advantage of official position, authority, relationship, connection or influence to unjustly enrich himself at the expense and to the damage and prejudice of the Filipino people and the Republic of the Philippines in the aggregate amount or total value of at least fifty million pesos (Php50,000,000).

Quite a mouthful for a law that is only three pages long. Get a copy of Republic Act No. 7080 for your daily dose and savor the words. The President of the country is obviously a public officer. The amount was easily breached with involving assets at around Php800 million. The remaining element was the nature of the wealth, ill-gotten or not, and its mode of acquisition, by a combination or series of criminal acts or not.

On the weeks leading to the verdict, the man on the street (that includes you and me) was only talking about the political dimension or the political consequences of the case. Things like, “Erap has to be convicted, there is no other way,” “I am sure he will be pardoned,” “He will be sentenced to a lesser offense,” “He will be acquitted and will be exiled.” Nobody seemed to care to discuss the merits of the case – did he or didn’t he? That seems to be the basic question after all – the determination of guilt or innocence.

To this day, six years after a former President, overwhelmingly elected, was arrested and sent to jail, across a hundred dramatic scenes played out in Tanay and in media, and Grishamish twists and turns in courtroom drama, it still hits me that our so-called weak democratic institutions managed to pull this through regardless of the critics and doubters. We finally made it to judgment day after coups, people power, and disasters of every conceivable kind. Our maligned courts and the era of hoodlums in robe (an Eraption, mind you) regardless of the perception of pressure or imagined or real influence, convicted Erap of the crime of plunder with reclusion perpetua as imprisonment without if’s and but’s. Let’s hand it to the justices - there was to be no middle ground or gray area or deal struck. The Filipino people is smart enough to smell one as far as, or as near as, Commonwealth Avenue.

The dispositive portion of the judgment and its reading was anti-climactic in a way. Some years back, all the lawyers would have played to the gallery and the camera by the lengthy proceedings leading to the climax and then emotional outbursts. This was not to be. It was a sober and dignified promulgation. Surely, a public trial does not mean a publicized trial as the Supreme Court and common sense holds. In People v. Estrada, it was the Republic of the Philippines and our values and system of governance that was on trial. In the plunder watch, it was the Filipino people who took the witness stand. For the former President of the masses, it was time to heed to the rule of law he passionately advocated and to put closure to the case of the century.