How new CJ Lucas Bersamin handled, voted on high-profile cases

As a member of the Supreme Court, Associate Justice Lucas Bersamin — the newly appointed Chief Justice — has been involved in rulings on several high-profile cases, including controversial ones.

This year, he voted in favor of the downgrading of P6.6-billion syndicated estafa charges against Delfin Lee, the ouster of chief justice Maria Lourdes Sereno, and the yearlong extension of martial law in Mindanao.

He was also among the majority vote that removed legal impediments to the burial of the late President Ferdinand Marcos at the Libingan ng mga Bayani, as well as the one that upheld the arrest of opposition Senator Leila de Lima over drug charges.

Bersamin's notable ponencias include the en banc decision siding with the Philippine Airlines' retrenchment of 1,400 cabin crew employees in 1998, and setting aside a 2008 division order for the reinstatement of the laid-off workers.

He also wrote the decision that acquitted former president and now Speaker Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo of plunder. It was Arroyo who appointed Bersamin to the Supreme Court.

Similarly, Bersamin also wrote the decision that granted bail to former Senate President Juan Ponce Enrile, an accused in the pork barrel scam, on humanitarian grounds.

Bersamin dissented against the majority decision that narrowly upheld the indictment of Enrile's fellow plunder defendant, former Senator Jinggoy Estrada, by the Office of the Ombudsman.

On the other hand, Bersamin and the rest of the justices at the time decided to declare as unconstitutional the controversial Priority Development Assistance Fund or pork barrel, the alleged misuse of which was the basis of charges against Enrile and Estrada.

Bersamin also penned the ruling that declared some acts under the Aquino administration's Disbursement Acceleration Program unconstitutional.

The new chief justice was also part of the unanimous vote that ordered the distribution of almost 5,000 hectares of land to some 6,000 farmer beneficiaries of the Cojuangco-owned Hacienda Luisita Inc.

In 2010, he wrote the decision that upheld Arroyo's authority to appoint the next chief justice despite a ban on "midnight appointments" provided under the 1987 Constitution.

Bersamin bested four other chief justice nominees: Senior Associate Justice Antonio Carpio, who has lost his final chance to be chief justice, and Associate Justices Diosdado Peralta, Estela Perlas-Bernabe, and Andres Reyes, Jr.

He would be primus inter pares — first among equals — at a time the SC is saddled with the task of deciding the constitutionality of President Rodrigo Duterte's war on drugs and his move to pull the Philippines out of the International Criminal Court, as well as a historic petition for the legalization of same-sex marriages in the country.

Bersamin has almost a year to spend in the Supreme Court before he reaches the mandatory retirement age of 70 in October 2019.

The Abra province native has been in the judiciary for 32 years, making him the most senior SC incumbents in terms of length of service in the judiciary. He is third most senior in terms of date of appointment to the high court.

A University of the East law graduate, Bersamin was appointed as a Quezon City regional trial court judge in 1986, promoted to the Court of Appeals in 2003, and designated to the SC in 2009. —KBK, GMA News