Joan Alvarez de Venecia, nephew of the third highest official in the land, is a firm believer that everyone is entitled to their day in court.
It is the tenet upon which her distinction as 2005 bar topnotcher, as the country’s most promising young lawyer, rests upon.
Contrary to what she exhorts people to think that women’s groups think, supporters of Nicole, woman who spat out the red apple four US Marines stuck in her mouth after rape in a moving van, do not idiotically question her duty to her clients once she had agreed to it.
Atty. De Venecia tests her brilliance in searching for just the right paragraph in texts of ambivalent human logic, in designing attacks and feints aimed only at legitimizing the obvious: that the Philippine courts will absolve these soldiers for their recreational crimes, for it is beyond reasonable doubt that they are superior.
In truth, women’s groups respect Atty. De Venecia’s duty to her chosen litigants. They acknowledge it just as she must their duty to throw at her dagger looks and snide remarks to enunciate that they view, with a certain disgust, a little amazement, but secretly with no surprise (never underestimate the overriding contents of a politician’s blood), the fact that she was a woman who decided to make the courts a more comfortable place for rapists, who, after all, have only 365 days of affecting innocence in a country that is their government’s little playground set.
Meanwhile, Atty. de Venecia will be haunted by “off-court” issues all her life.
