THE plunder case of former senator Ramon “Bong” Revilla Jr. is not over after the Sandiganbayan acquitted him and convicted instead co-accused Richard Cambe, the former member of his staff (Revilla had denied Cambe was his chief of staff), and Janet Lim-Napoles, one of the major players in the P10 billion pork barrel scam.
It merely shifted the deliberation on the case from the anti-graft court to the court of public opinion where the ruling is now being digested by legal minds and laymen alike. In the process, the evidence and the legal points involved are being scrutinized again by a public anxious of getting the correct ruling.
And Revilla is defending himself once again, this time in the same court of public opinion even if he now sports a wide smile wherever he goes after he was freed. He and his supporters feel justice has finally been served four years since the case was lodged in court and he was jailed for the same amount of time.
But a good number of people also feel the contrary, feeling that justice has not been served on this one but must still be served in another forum. Revilla may have escaped physical detention but he has not been freed from public scrutiny.
This is because instead of pausing a bit he is again running for senator and willingly entered the court of public opinion where the scrutiny and deliberation is not as cut and dried. Even now, he is getting his share of flak because of the ruling. And will continue to receive such as the elections near.
For Revilla, the next ruling after the Sandiganbayan issued its own would be during the May 2019 elections when voters decide whether he is fit to hold a public office again and allowed to tinker with pork barrel funds—which under the Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo administration in the House of Representatives is back in play—once more.
The worry is that Revilla and the others linked to the pork barrel scam like Jinggoy Estrada and Juan Ponce Enrile, who are also gunning for Senate seats again, would win. Unfortunately, for our kind of democracy, that is, to use a cliché, the way the cookie crumbles.