MANILA, Philippines — At the RTC in Lucena City, judges and court employees also sympathized and showed their support to the Chief Justice on the first day of the impeachment trial by wearing black t-shirts during flag raising ceremony and Mass held Monday morning at the compound of Lucena RTC.

In Southern Philippines, judges and workers of lower courts in Mindanao assailed the barrage of pretrial negative reports exposed in the media.

“These were absurdly unfair and meant to portray Chief Justice Corona like a devil,” a judge in one of more than a dozen of Regional Trial Courts in Region 12 told the Manila Bulletin Monday.

The judge, who preferred not to be named so as not to “draw Malacañang’s ire,” was apparently referring to a series of reports ranging from the so-called Corona family’s 45 questionable houses and lots to the purported World Bank’s aide memoire that mushroomed in the media before and during the Senate trial.

Because of the “unfair treatment against CJ,” the judge said, he and his counterparts in all trial courts in Mindanao alongside their rank and file personnel intensified Monday their wearing of black clothes and arms bands to dramatize their sympathy for Corona and “mourn the death of Supreme Court’s independence.”

“If a Chief Justice like Corona cannot be safe from the vendetta of Malacañang, nobody in this country is free from undue persecution,” the judge said.

But unlike in other trial courts in Metro Manila, judges in Marikina City did not suspend their court sessions, but instead showed various signs of support by keeping them abreast regarding the on going impeachment trial.

Also, retired Lingayen-Dagupan Archbishop Oscar Cruz Monday called on the Senator-Judges sitting on the impeachment trial of Corona to base their verdict only on truth and not on political affiliation.

“I hope they vote according to truth and not according to public opinion and political affiliation,” Cruz said in an interview.

As this developed, the public has been urged by an official of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines (CBCP) to pray and fast during the impeachment trial of Corona.

The militant group Kilusang Magbubukid ng Pilipinas (KMP) welcomes the impeachment trial against Corona by saying the magistrate was “one of the stumbling blocks to the prosecution of former President and now Pampanga Representative Gloria Macapagal Arroyo for her crimes.”

“The people must be warned of a more evil plot of Aquino taking control over the Supreme Court (SC),” said KMP secretary general Danilo Ramos.

A key consideration of this plot, Ramos detailed, is “to overturn the recent High Court’s ruling to distribute Hacienda Luisita to the farmers and workers.” (Chito A. Chavez, Danny Estacio, Ali G. Macabalang, Leslie Ann G. Aquino, Marvyn N. Benaning, Madelynne Dominguez, and Samuel P. Medenilla)