After the Aug. 21, 1971 Plaza Miranda bombing, President Ferdinand Marcos suspended the writ of habeas corpus. Proclamation No. 889, which allowed the police to make arrests without warrants and to detain the arrested without charges, took effect immediately but was announced to the public only after a few days. It seems clear now that the tactic was a dress rehearsal for the full-scale imposition of martial law the following year.
Marcos, entering the second half of his second and last term, was anxious about how the Supreme Court would rule on the constitutionality of the suspension of the writ, which had been immediately challenged. So he did what came naturally to him: He subverted yet another democratic institution.
Soon after hearings on the case started, he invited his first appointee to the Supreme Court, Associate Justice Fred Ruiz Castro, for a consultation. The following extended passage from “Diary of a Dictator” by the journalist William Rempel (whose name I had mistakenly pluralized—Rempels—in an earlier column) makes for disturbing reading.
“On Tuesday night, September 16, 1971, Justice Castro was a special guest at the presidential palace for a private session that reeked of legal and ethical conflicts. Over a late evening dinner, the judge described how the case was playing to his colleagues on the bench. He handicapped the current leanings and likely votes of each justice. It was the judge’s first act as a spy for the Marcos legal team.
“The president, in turn, lobbied the jurist. Spared any cross examination or challenges to accuracy, Marcos made arguments and shared classified documents supporting his widely disputed claims of a Communist insurgency and the purely specious allegations that Senator [Ninoy] Aquino was in league with the New People’s Army.
“The mere fact that the jurist met secretly with one side violated a raft of legal principles from basic rules of fairness and due process to the separation of powers. And Justice Castro offered Marcos what sounded to the president like a magic trick. If Marcos immediately lifted the suspension in some regions of the country, Castro believed that he could persuade the court to uphold the president’s previous proclamation unanimously.
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