The Trouble With a Witness Who Remembers Too Selectively
There is an old courtroom difficulty which no amount of legal polish can completely conceal: a witness may answer every question put to her and yet leave the public knowing less than when the questioning began. That, in substance, was the complaint raised by members of the prosecution panel after the testimony of Gina Acosta, former special disbursing officer of the Office of the Vice President, concerning the handling of roughly ₱500 million in confidential funds.
Acosta’s answer, repeated often enough to become the most memorable feature of the proceedings, was that the money had been turned over to Col. Raymund Dante Lachica, former head of the Vice Presidential Security and Protection Group. There is, of course, nothing inherently suspicious about repeating an answer if that answer happens to be true. A witness should not be expected to invent a new version merely to satisfy the impatience of counsel. But repetition acquires a different character when distinct questions, directed at different portions of a financial transaction, seem always to arrive at precisely the same terminus.
This was what irritated the prosecution.
Lorna Kapunan called the testimony a “broken record,” or plakang sira. Amando Virgil Ligutan used another familiar expression: de kahon. “Many questions, one answer,” he observed. Joel Chua dispensed even with those qualifications and said the answers appeared “coached.” “Her answer is obviously scripted,” Chua said. Whatever was asked, he complained, the direction of the answer remained Lachica.
These are serious criticisms, and they should not casually be converted into findings of fact. To say that testimony sounds rehearsed is not to prove that somebody rehearsed it. To say that a witness appears coached is not proof that a lawyer supplied the answers. The distinction matters, particularly in an impeachment proceeding where partisan conclusions tend to form long before evidentiary ones.
But the prosecution’s point deserves more than a shrug precisely because its concern was not confined to one repeated name. What caught its attention was the apparent pattern of recollection surrounding that name.
Ligutan questioned Acosta about her earlier work as special disbursing officer when Sara Duterte was mayor of Davao City. On several details, Acosta said she could no longer remember. Yet, according to Ligutan, when the defense pursued a similar period of her service, her recollection appeared considerably less troubled. “You said you could no longer remember when you were in Davao,” he told her, before pointing to answers concerning the years 2018 to 2022 that he believed had come with greater ease.
Thus entered into the proceedings that wonderfully diplomatic courtroom phrase: “selective memory.”
Selective memory is an accusation frequently made and rarely easy to prove. Human recollection is not an accounting ledger. A person may remember an office procedure and forget an amount; remember the existence of an audit document and forget the date on which a transaction was made. Acosta herself offered essentially this explanation. She said she could remember that no Commission on Audit memoranda had been issued concerning certain matters, while being unable to recall the exact amounts of confidential funds from Duterte’s years as Davao mayor.
That explanation is possible. It is also precisely the kind of explanation that becomes more difficult for a witness when the contrast in memory appears to correspond too neatly with the identity of the questioner.
Benjamin Tolosa made this the prosecution’s practical complaint. When prosecution lawyers were asking, he said, Acosta sometimes seemed to have difficulty answering or understanding. When defense counsel took over, he observed, comprehension appeared faster and the responses more immediate. Chua’s conclusion was harsher: de kahon. Kapunan supplied the imagery of the defective phonograph. Ligutan, more cautiously, left judgment to those watching.
One need not endorse every prosecutorial flourish to recognize why this matters.
Senator-judge Erwin Tulfo on Monday raised doubts about Acosta’s supposed difficulty speaking in Filipino or English at the Senate impeachment trial of Vice President Sara Duterte.
Acosta, a former special disbursing officer of the Office of the Vice President and currently a member of its staff, answered questions in Bisaya on Monday morning, prompting the Senate impeachment court to try to find a translator.
Describing the apparent language barrier as “deception,” Tulfo asked the court to compel Acosta to respond in Filipino.
“I know, Ms. Witness, that you can understand Tagalog and that you can speak Tagalog because this is several pages long,” he said, holding up a transcript of the 2024 House hearing.
He noted that Acosta had also responded in English to questions asked in English.
“Why does it seem that you are having such a hard time now, that your answers have to be translated from Tagalog into Bisaya? We will take a year here, Mr. President,” Tulfo said.
Tulfo’s intervention added a new dimension to the prosecution’s concern. The issue was no longer only whether Acosta remembered selectively or repeated a prepared answer. It was also whether the witness was presenting a language difficulty that did not appear consistently across the proceedings.
That, too, requires caution. A witness may be more comfortable speaking in one language when discussing technical or unfamiliar matters. She may understand a question in Filipino or English but prefer to answer in Bisaya, particularly under the pressure of a public trial. Language preference is not, by itself, evidence of deception.
Still, the contrast noted by Tulfo was not trivial. If Acosta could understand Tagalog, speak it in prior proceedings and answer English questions in English, the court was entitled to ask why a translator had suddenly become necessary. The answer may be innocent. But the court should not be expected to ignore a change in communicative ability when that change affects the pace and substance of testimony.
The problem of confidential funds has always been that secrecy, though sometimes justified by the nature of intelligence work, creates an extraordinary burden of institutional trust. Ordinary government expenditure travels under the discipline of invoices, contracts, names, quantities and deliverables. Confidential expenditure necessarily removes some of these things from public inspection. Precisely because the usual windows are shuttered, the remaining mechanisms of accountability must be stronger, not weaker.
When hundreds of millions of pesos pass through an office under a regime of confidentiality, “I turned it over” cannot automatically become the end of institutional inquiry. It may be the beginning of the answer, but it is not the whole answer. Turned over under whose authority? By what procedure? With what documentation? Who thereafter assumed responsibility for custody, disbursement and liquidation? What did the disbursing officer understand her duty to be before and after the transfer?
Those are not necessarily accusations of theft. They are the ordinary questions that follow public money.
This is why Acosta’s repeated reference to Lachica became so important to prosecutors. The issue was not merely whether she named the same man several times. It was whether the repetition functioned, intentionally or otherwise, as a wall beyond which the questioning could not travel. A bureaucracy cannot permit responsibility to dissolve simply by moving money from one official hand to another. If Officer A says the money went to Officer B, and Officer B points elsewhere, public accountability can rapidly become a children’s game of pass-the-parcel, except that the parcel contains taxpayers’ money.
The prosecution acquired another reason for suspicion when Acosta acknowledged meeting Lindon Bacquel, one of Duterte’s defense lawyers, roughly two weeks before she took the witness stand. Bacquel subsequently conducted her cross-examination. Acosta said she had merely asked about Senate procedure and what to expect in the proceedings. She denied being supplied questions or answers.
Michael Poa, speaking for the defense, said the lawyers had been careful in dealing with potential witnesses, especially after subpoenas had been issued. Discussions, he said, would be limited to broad procedural matters and would avoid the substance of testimony for ethical reasons. He also said he had no personal knowledge of what transpired between Bacquel and Acosta because he was not present.
Again, a meeting is not proof of coaching. Lawyers routinely explain procedure to people who must enter intimidating legal proceedings. It would be irresponsible to leap from acquaintance to conspiracy. Chua’s “coached” should therefore be understood for what it was: the conclusion of a prosecutor observing the witness, not yet an independently established fact.
But neither can appearances simply be declared irrelevant. Impeachment is a constitutional proceeding conducted partly in the language of law and partly in the language of public confidence. A witness who meets a defense lawyer shortly before testimony, then appears markedly more fluent under defense questioning than under prosecution questioning, inevitably invites scrutiny. That scrutiny may ultimately prove unfair. The way to dispel it, however, is not indignation but clarity.
There is something almost quaintly bureaucratic about the phrase de kahon. It belongs to an older Filipino vocabulary of suspicion, reserved for statements that emerge too perfectly formed, too conveniently uniform, like papers produced from the same government stencil. Perhaps Acosta’s answers were simply consistent because the underlying events were simple. Perhaps she really did transfer the funds to Lachica and genuinely knows little of what followed. If so, further testimony and documentary evidence should establish that without difficulty.
Perhaps, too, her use of Bisaya was simply a matter of comfort rather than strategy. But if a witness can speak and understand Filipino or English in some portions of the record and then appears unable to proceed without translation in others, the court is entitled to examine that inconsistency with the same care it applies to inconsistencies in financial testimony.
But if a public officer entrusted with hundreds of millions can describe her responsibility principally by saying that she handed the money to somebody else, the impeachment court has stumbled upon a problem larger than the credibility of one witness.
It has stumbled upon the old Philippine problem of administrative responsibility: everybody participated in the process, yet at the crucial moment nobody seems to possess the whole story.
Kapunan called it a broken record. Ligutan called it de kahon. Chua called it coached. Tulfo called the apparent language barrier deception. The prosecution may eventually prove too suspicious, or it may prove prescient. For the moment, the more important question is simpler.
Five hundred million pesos should leave behind something more substantial than an echo.
Acosta’s answer, repeated often enough to become the most memorable feature of the proceedings, was that the money had been turned over to Col. Raymund Dante Lachica, former head of the Vice Presidential Security and Protection Group. There is, of course, nothing inherently suspicious about repeating an answer if that answer happens to be true. A witness should not be expected to invent a new version merely to satisfy the impatience of counsel. But repetition acquires a different character when distinct questions, directed at different portions of a financial transaction, seem always to arrive at precisely the same terminus.
This was what irritated the prosecution.
Lorna Kapunan called the testimony a “broken record,” or plakang sira. Amando Virgil Ligutan used another familiar expression: de kahon. “Many questions, one answer,” he observed. Joel Chua dispensed even with those qualifications and said the answers appeared “coached.” “Her answer is obviously scripted,” Chua said. Whatever was asked, he complained, the direction of the answer remained Lachica.
These are serious criticisms, and they should not casually be converted into findings of fact. To say that testimony sounds rehearsed is not to prove that somebody rehearsed it. To say that a witness appears coached is not proof that a lawyer supplied the answers. The distinction matters, particularly in an impeachment proceeding where partisan conclusions tend to form long before evidentiary ones.
But the prosecution’s point deserves more than a shrug precisely because its concern was not confined to one repeated name. What caught its attention was the apparent pattern of recollection surrounding that name.
Ligutan questioned Acosta about her earlier work as special disbursing officer when Sara Duterte was mayor of Davao City. On several details, Acosta said she could no longer remember. Yet, according to Ligutan, when the defense pursued a similar period of her service, her recollection appeared considerably less troubled. “You said you could no longer remember when you were in Davao,” he told her, before pointing to answers concerning the years 2018 to 2022 that he believed had come with greater ease.
Thus entered into the proceedings that wonderfully diplomatic courtroom phrase: “selective memory.”
Selective memory is an accusation frequently made and rarely easy to prove. Human recollection is not an accounting ledger. A person may remember an office procedure and forget an amount; remember the existence of an audit document and forget the date on which a transaction was made. Acosta herself offered essentially this explanation. She said she could remember that no Commission on Audit memoranda had been issued concerning certain matters, while being unable to recall the exact amounts of confidential funds from Duterte’s years as Davao mayor.
That explanation is possible. It is also precisely the kind of explanation that becomes more difficult for a witness when the contrast in memory appears to correspond too neatly with the identity of the questioner.
Benjamin Tolosa made this the prosecution’s practical complaint. When prosecution lawyers were asking, he said, Acosta sometimes seemed to have difficulty answering or understanding. When defense counsel took over, he observed, comprehension appeared faster and the responses more immediate. Chua’s conclusion was harsher: de kahon. Kapunan supplied the imagery of the defective phonograph. Ligutan, more cautiously, left judgment to those watching.
One need not endorse every prosecutorial flourish to recognize why this matters.
Senator-judge Erwin Tulfo on Monday raised doubts about Acosta’s supposed difficulty speaking in Filipino or English at the Senate impeachment trial of Vice President Sara Duterte.
Acosta, a former special disbursing officer of the Office of the Vice President and currently a member of its staff, answered questions in Bisaya on Monday morning, prompting the Senate impeachment court to try to find a translator.
Describing the apparent language barrier as “deception,” Tulfo asked the court to compel Acosta to respond in Filipino.
“I know, Ms. Witness, that you can understand Tagalog and that you can speak Tagalog because this is several pages long,” he said, holding up a transcript of the 2024 House hearing.
He noted that Acosta had also responded in English to questions asked in English.
“Why does it seem that you are having such a hard time now, that your answers have to be translated from Tagalog into Bisaya? We will take a year here, Mr. President,” Tulfo said.
Tulfo’s intervention added a new dimension to the prosecution’s concern. The issue was no longer only whether Acosta remembered selectively or repeated a prepared answer. It was also whether the witness was presenting a language difficulty that did not appear consistently across the proceedings.
That, too, requires caution. A witness may be more comfortable speaking in one language when discussing technical or unfamiliar matters. She may understand a question in Filipino or English but prefer to answer in Bisaya, particularly under the pressure of a public trial. Language preference is not, by itself, evidence of deception.
Still, the contrast noted by Tulfo was not trivial. If Acosta could understand Tagalog, speak it in prior proceedings and answer English questions in English, the court was entitled to ask why a translator had suddenly become necessary. The answer may be innocent. But the court should not be expected to ignore a change in communicative ability when that change affects the pace and substance of testimony.
The problem of confidential funds has always been that secrecy, though sometimes justified by the nature of intelligence work, creates an extraordinary burden of institutional trust. Ordinary government expenditure travels under the discipline of invoices, contracts, names, quantities and deliverables. Confidential expenditure necessarily removes some of these things from public inspection. Precisely because the usual windows are shuttered, the remaining mechanisms of accountability must be stronger, not weaker.
When hundreds of millions of pesos pass through an office under a regime of confidentiality, “I turned it over” cannot automatically become the end of institutional inquiry. It may be the beginning of the answer, but it is not the whole answer. Turned over under whose authority? By what procedure? With what documentation? Who thereafter assumed responsibility for custody, disbursement and liquidation? What did the disbursing officer understand her duty to be before and after the transfer?
Those are not necessarily accusations of theft. They are the ordinary questions that follow public money.
This is why Acosta’s repeated reference to Lachica became so important to prosecutors. The issue was not merely whether she named the same man several times. It was whether the repetition functioned, intentionally or otherwise, as a wall beyond which the questioning could not travel. A bureaucracy cannot permit responsibility to dissolve simply by moving money from one official hand to another. If Officer A says the money went to Officer B, and Officer B points elsewhere, public accountability can rapidly become a children’s game of pass-the-parcel, except that the parcel contains taxpayers’ money.
The prosecution acquired another reason for suspicion when Acosta acknowledged meeting Lindon Bacquel, one of Duterte’s defense lawyers, roughly two weeks before she took the witness stand. Bacquel subsequently conducted her cross-examination. Acosta said she had merely asked about Senate procedure and what to expect in the proceedings. She denied being supplied questions or answers.
Michael Poa, speaking for the defense, said the lawyers had been careful in dealing with potential witnesses, especially after subpoenas had been issued. Discussions, he said, would be limited to broad procedural matters and would avoid the substance of testimony for ethical reasons. He also said he had no personal knowledge of what transpired between Bacquel and Acosta because he was not present.
Again, a meeting is not proof of coaching. Lawyers routinely explain procedure to people who must enter intimidating legal proceedings. It would be irresponsible to leap from acquaintance to conspiracy. Chua’s “coached” should therefore be understood for what it was: the conclusion of a prosecutor observing the witness, not yet an independently established fact.
But neither can appearances simply be declared irrelevant. Impeachment is a constitutional proceeding conducted partly in the language of law and partly in the language of public confidence. A witness who meets a defense lawyer shortly before testimony, then appears markedly more fluent under defense questioning than under prosecution questioning, inevitably invites scrutiny. That scrutiny may ultimately prove unfair. The way to dispel it, however, is not indignation but clarity.
There is something almost quaintly bureaucratic about the phrase de kahon. It belongs to an older Filipino vocabulary of suspicion, reserved for statements that emerge too perfectly formed, too conveniently uniform, like papers produced from the same government stencil. Perhaps Acosta’s answers were simply consistent because the underlying events were simple. Perhaps she really did transfer the funds to Lachica and genuinely knows little of what followed. If so, further testimony and documentary evidence should establish that without difficulty.
Perhaps, too, her use of Bisaya was simply a matter of comfort rather than strategy. But if a witness can speak and understand Filipino or English in some portions of the record and then appears unable to proceed without translation in others, the court is entitled to examine that inconsistency with the same care it applies to inconsistencies in financial testimony.
But if a public officer entrusted with hundreds of millions can describe her responsibility principally by saying that she handed the money to somebody else, the impeachment court has stumbled upon a problem larger than the credibility of one witness.
It has stumbled upon the old Philippine problem of administrative responsibility: everybody participated in the process, yet at the crucial moment nobody seems to possess the whole story.
Kapunan called it a broken record. Ligutan called it de kahon. Chua called it coached. Tulfo called the apparent language barrier deception. The prosecution may eventually prove too suspicious, or it may prove prescient. For the moment, the more important question is simpler.
Five hundred million pesos should leave behind something more substantial than an echo.