Supreme Court ‘defamed’ Cebu’s Vicente Sotto in punishing him for contempt
Surviving libel, other complaints
Supreme Court ‘defamed’ Cebu’s Vicente Sotto in punishing him for contempt
PACHICO A. SEARES
May 3, 2023
The Tribunal said it was not an issue of press freedom but SC reaffirmed its ‘addiction’ to the precepts of press freedom, including “the right to comment on pending judicial cases and the right to criticize the public and private life of public officers, without any exception”
A news reporter, Angel J. Parazo, reported on Sept. 14, 1948 in his newspaper Star Reporter an alleged leak of the questions in the 1948 bar exams. Summoned by the Supreme Court, he refused to reveal his news source, citing Republic Act #53, known as Press Freedom Law and authored by Cebuano senator Vicente Y. Sotto, which protects the journalist from naming the person or persons who provided him the story.
The SC told Parazo the exception in the law — “in the interest of the state” — but the reporter continued to refuse, prompting the court to send him to jail for 30 days.
Sotto attacked the decision in a press statement, published in, among others, the Manila Times of Dec. 9, 1948. “The Supreme Court can send me to jail but it cannot close my mouth.” . At the Rizal Day celebration in Cebu City held at Abellana High School (now Abellana National School), he again attacked the SC, which the Manila Bulletin reported in its Jan. 3, 1949 issue. Sotto said “there was more freedom of speech when Americans sat in the Tribunal than now when it is composed of our countrymen.”
The SC ordered Sotto on Dec. 7, 1948 to show cause why he shouldn’t be punished for for contempt. On Jan. 21, 1949, the SC en banc decided to punish Sotto, senator and practicing lawyer, with a fine of P1,000, with imprisonment in case of failure to pay, and to explain to the court why he shouldn’t be disbarred. He died at the age of 73 on May 28, 1950, before which he kept criticizing the SC decision against Parazo.
The late Clarence Paul Oaminal, who ran a history column in The Freeman, wrote in 2014 that the court penalty against Sotto was not enforced. His illness during the controversy, which led to his death a year and four months after the court ruling, must have been the reason.
[Don Vicente Yap Sotto and the Supreme Court on the Press Freedom Law. The Freeman, July 6, 2014.]
Takeaways from the Sotto incident and Supreme Court case, which instruct media and the public on journalists freedom and its limits, starting with how the decision “defamed” the senator-lawyer from Cebu:
[1] WHY THE SC FOUND SOTTO GUILTY. In the main decision, the SC’s main pronouncement was that it found Sotto guilty because in all his statements he “misrepresented to the public the cause of the charge” against him for contempt of court . Sotto said he criticized in defense of press freedom when in fact, the SC said, he was charged with intending to interfere and influence the final decision on reporter Parazo’s case through “intimidations and false accusations.”
What stung the Tribunal was that Sotto didn’t limit himself to “merely criticizing or commenting” on the Parazo ruling. The main ruling said Sotto intended to intimidate the SC justices with a plan to present a bill in Congress that would reorganize the court and reduce the number of justices from 11 to seven. Sotto called the justices “incompetent and narrow-minded” and “attacked the honesty and integrity of the court.” Sotto said, “As it is now, the Supreme Court of today constitutes a constant peril to liberty and democracy.” For the last years, he said, the SC “has been committing deliberately so many blunders and injustices.”
[2] EXCEPTION CHANGED ONLY IN 1956. If argument was confined to the law at the time — Republic Act #53 — Sotto was wrong in interpreting the law. The SC rightly noted that there was an exception; reporter Parazo could be compelled under the exception “in the interest of the state.”
Interestingly, Sotto didn’t mention the exception in his attacks against the court. Maybe because Parazo’s disclosure could fall under the exception “in the interest of the state.”
The law was first amended on June 15, 1956. Under R.A. 1477, the amendatory law passed by Congress eight years after the Sotto-SC fracas, a journalist may be compelled by a court or committee of Congress to reveal the source of his information, given him in confidence, if it is demanded by “the security of the state, without prejudice to his liability under civil and criminal laws.” The bar is higher now but it wasn’t so when Sotto defended Parazo and publicly flogged the Tribunal.
Associate Justice Gregorio Perfecto wrote the separate concurring opinion that called Sotto names.
[3] THE NAMES SOTTO WAS CALLED. It was in the separate concurring opinion of then associate justice Gregorio Perfecto (1945-49) that Sotto got heavy thrashing. The Cebuano lawyer-senator, author of the Press Freedom law, was defamed, within the meaning of the law on libel, but of course the late AJ Perfecto (who died Aug. 17, 1949) and his colleagues couldn’t be liable for libel or any other offense; they were doing their job.
AJ Perfecto listed “facts” that he said “we cannot ignore in deciding the case,” including these:
Not the first time Sotto had been charged with “grave misbehavior and for perpetrating stark falsehoods.” An SC decision of Sept. 6, 1918 disbarred him for being guilty of “lack of fidelity to clients,” “blackmailing” in his law practice, using a newspaper column to “blacken the reputation” of people who didn’t yield to his demands; maligning by publication a judge who fined him for libel; and giving false testimony in perjury.
He was convicted of libel on Sept. 4, 1918 for “besmirching the reputation” of three persons.
Sotto lost all 15 SC cases, except three, since liberation, which, the Perfecto opinion said, explained his grudge against the Tribunal.
The Perfecto opinion also tagged Sotto a “libeler,” a “blackmailer,” and an “abductor,” names that he apparently based on recorded convictions. Indirectly, Sotto was also maligned, including “swaggering political ruffians” and “cutthroats bent on thwarting the scale of justice.”
[4] DISSENT TO SOTTO’S MARTYRDOM. AJ Perfecto slammed Sotto’s “too much effrontery” to pose as a martyr. using the contempt charge against him “no less than for the sake of press freedom.” Perfecto’s opinion cited the lawyer-senator’s “long list of cases in the courts of justice.”
Here’s a clearly harsh one from Perfecto’s opinion: “…We have before us the case of an individual who has lowered himself to the depths of moral depravity — a despicable habitual liar, unscrupulous vilifier and slanderer, un-repented blackguard, shameful and shameless libeler, unmindful of the principles of decency in all hardened criminals.” And: “He is a disgrace to the human species. He is a shame to the Senate.”
Obviously, Perfecto had a figurative ax to bury in Sotto’s back as Sotto, Perfecto said, had gone after him. Sotto had more than a year after the decision was promulgated early in 1949 before his death near mid-1950 to strike back. Given his personality and the forums he had as senator and newspaper publisher, Sotto must have replied to the scathing language in the decision.
[5] WAS IT AN ISSUE OF PRESS FREEDOM? “Not in the least,” said AJ Perfecto in his concurring but separate opinion. Sotto’s statements were not published by him “as a newspaperman, edttor or journalist. Perfecto said Sotto didn’t appear to be “a member of the staff of anyone of the papers that published his statements. And, Perfecto said, “We did not even molest said newspapers. their editors have not been cited for contempt. We did not interfere with their freedom to publish the scurrilous statement.”
Maybe it wasn’t brought to the court’s attention that Sotto wrote, if he did, in his own newspaper in Cebu. (There was no showing that Sotto’s “Independent” and “Ang Suga” were still publishing in 1948-49. The court could’ve read only the statements made by Sotto in Manila-based newspapers.)
Pushing its thesis that press freedom wasn’t involved, the Perfecto opinion said it wouldn’t have punished Sotto had he not attempted, “by his browbeating, to undermine and overthrow the foundation of our judicial system and actually sought to defeat and miscarry justice” in a pending litigation.
[6] WHY HE WAS SPARED JAIL TERM. Sotto, Perfecto said, deserved to be meted six-month imprisonment, the maximum allowed by Rule 64 of the Rules of Court, and that wouldn’t have been “heavy enough” because of falsehoods and other aggravating circumstances.
But Sotto was meted only the P1,000 fine, with subsidiary imprisonment in case of insolvency. Perfecto cited “high reasons of humanity”: he was “old” (72 when convicted of contempt) and “according to his physician, suffering from myologenous leukemia with moderately severe anemia, requiring absolute avoidance of any form of physical and mental strain.” We don’t wish, the opinion said, to endanger his life by sending him to prison. Citing the biblical injunction “Thou shalt not kill,” Perfecto couldn’t resist whiplashing with, “Even the lives of moral lepers have to be spared.”
[In re Vicente Sotto, for contempt of court, Jan. 21. 1949, Supreme Court, lawphil.net]
[7] SC ‘ADDICTION’ TO PRECEPT ON PRESS FREEDOM. If at the cost of shaming Sotto, the SC’s ruling produced something good: an affirmation to free speech and free press. Perfecto ended his opinion with an affirmation of the court’s “addiction to” certain propositions, including these:
Freedom of the press “includes the right to comment on pending judicial cases and the right to criticize the public and private life of all public officers, without any exception.”
Freedom of the press “does not, however, safeguard any publication intended to bully courts in order to sway their judgment on pending cases, and such interference and obstruction should be promptly and drastically checked for the sake of an effective administration of justice.” 