Prosecution rests confidential funds case, reserves right to call VP Duterte as witness

On the twenty-third day of Vice President Sara Duterte's Senate impeachment trial, the prosecution made a calculated pivot. Private prosecutor Lorna Kapunan stood before presiding officer Senator Francis "Chiz" Escudero on Tuesday morning, September 8, and announced that the House prosecution team would abandon fifteen of its twenty-seven originally planned witnesses for the first article of impeachment—the one centered on the alleged misuse and misappropriation of 612.5 million pesos in confidential funds. Instead, they would reserve the right to call Duterte herself to the stand.

Kapunan framed the decision as the result of careful deliberation among public and private prosecutors, discussions that had begun the night before and continued into the morning. She described her position to Escudero with candor: she had been tasked with a difficult job. The strategy was bold, even theatrical. Every witness who had testified so far, Kapunan argued, pointed in the same direction. She invoked a chess metaphor—all the pawns and castles and horses and bishops on the board pointed to one figure alone. "The queen," she said. "And it is the queen here, the Vice President."

The prosecution's reasoning was straightforward: if all the evidence and testimony accumulated over three weeks of trial converged on a single person's accountability, why call fifteen more witnesses to the stand? Better to go directly to the source. Kapunan suggested that the Senate impeachment court would likely be compelled to summon Duterte in order for the proceedings to have legitimacy. Without the Vice President's own testimony—without her appearing in court to affirm or deny the allegations—the public would never know whether the prosecution's case, built on witnesses and evidence, actually held weight when examined through what Kapunan called "the lens of political neutrality."

When Escudero asked directly whether the prosecution was requesting a subpoena against the Vice President, Kapunan declined. Not at this time, she said. The prosecution was taking a different approach: they would rest their case on article I with a reservation. At the conclusion of all four articles of impeachment—after the prosecution had presented its remaining cases on unexplained wealth, bribery, and grave threats—they reserved the right to call Duterte as a witness. She might also call an amicus curiae, a friend of the court who could help clarify the constitutional framers' original intent on impeachment and public accountability, though no specific candidate was named.

The move represented a significant recalibration of the prosecution's strategy. They had originally planned to call twenty-seven witnesses across the confidential funds article alone. Now they were cutting that number by more than half, betting instead that the testimony already given had built a sufficient foundation. Kapunan's language suggested confidence—all roads led to the Vice President. Yet the decision to reserve rather than immediately demand her testimony also reflected the constraints of the proceeding itself. The prosecution could not simply compel the respondent to take the stand; they could only reserve the right to call her when the time came. Whether Duterte would actually appear remained an open question, one that would not be resolved until the prosecution had finished presenting its case on the remaining three articles of impeachment.