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Supreme Court, beset by scandals, awaits two new appointments
by Eric Jackson

In Panama, the standard of judicial accountability is that a high court magistrate can be caught in the act of negotiating a $20,000 bribe to let a Colombian drug trafficker walk and there's no accountability. That was shown to the nation in 1999, when despite incriminating tapes, the legislature acquitted José Manuel Faúndes, and the basic reality hasn't changed.

One formal change, however, was in the 2004 constitutional revisions, wherein the legislature gave up its power to strip its members of immunity from investigation or prosecution to the Supreme Court, keeping its powers to judge high court magistrates. That has set up what critics call a mutual non-aggression pact, which, however, does not seem totally rigid --- the National Assembly deputies don't question the magistrates, and the Supreme Court judges don't question the legislators. The exceptions to this have all been on the court's side but have generally been to authorize investigations that have gone nowhere, but in one recent case was to allow the courts to impose a "stay away" order against a legislator accused of domestic violence.

There are 20 prosecutor requests for the lifting of immunity from criminal investigations from 17 legislators, several of them having waited for years without any action, pending before the Supreme Court.

And so it was that on December 19 the National Assembly threw out three complaints against high court magistrates and decided that two others really didn't involve members of the Supreme Court so prosecutors could go ahead and investigate.

Those latter two cases, really one, were about Blas "Toto" Velásquez, a guy who hangs out at the Supreme Court a lot and, despite a US drug warrant against him served as an aide to magistrate Winston Spadafora when the latter was Minister of Government and Justice in the Moscoso administration. A Chiriqui woman who has a land dispute with a utility company pending before the high court complained that Velásquez, claiming to be representing magistrates José Troyano and Alberto Cigarruista, demanded a $2 million payoff in order for her to win her case, in which she has prevailed in all the lower courts. That being the case, and because the Supreme Court has held that if a person with immunity from investigation or prosecution conspires to commit a crime with a person who doesn't have immunity, the public official's immunity extends to the civilian, Attorney General Ana Matilde Gómez referred the case to the legislature for permission to investigate. But the assembly's Credentials Committee decided that since the woman who complained had no direct contact with Troyano and Cigarruista --- who deny the allegation that they were involved in any bribery scheme --- the legislature has no power to say anything about the case against Velásquez. However, if the Velásquez case turns up evidence against the magistrates, the investigating prosecutor could be charged with the crime of exceeding his or her powers.

Ordinary court employees, on the other hand, don't get immunity in their own right. Magistrate Spadafora's law clerk Osvaldo Aguilar, for example, has since December 12 been lodged at the La Joyita Penitentiary, where he awaits trial on charges of having had sexual relations with a nine-year-old girl.

The court, thus protected from legal liability but the object of national and international scorn for its pervasive aroma of corruption, now awaits changes. On December 31 the 10-year terms of Graciela Dixon and José Troyano expire and neither will be appointed for a new term. (Dixon, the target of an international campaign by human rights groups, was recently rejected for a post on the International Criminal Court.) There have been 74 applicants to fill the two court vacancies, and although there has been a formal interview, screening and recommendation process it's likely that President Torrijos already had his choices in mind before any of that. As this article was written, those choices have not been announced.

Will the new appointments improve Panamanian justice? That remains to be seen. Some critics of the Torrijos administration fear that what they will do is give the president the majority of his appointees that he'd need to strike down the constitutional prohibition against his standing for re-election, while supporters note that the current president's appointees to the high court have had a lot better judicial credentials than those of his predecessor, Mireya Moscoso.

At the start of the Torrijos administration it had appeared that there would be a majority of Moscoso appointees on the nine-member court throughout the current presidency, but then the president invoked a statute banning people over age 70 from holding government jobs against the late magistrate Cesar Pereira Burgos. With that upheld Torrijos gained a majority of judges appointed by PRD presidents. With these two new appointments, there will be a majority of Torrijos appointees.

Winston Spadafora, surely the most controversial of Moscoso's picks, doesn't like it. "This is a Supreme Court of humble people," the wealthy magistrate from Chitre said in a TVN interview, "not like before, when the big law firms had their representatives." But, Spadafora charged in the same Dialogo show with Luz María Noli, he feels "slandered and injured" because "there's a group of political and economic interests that wants to take control." Spadafora has repeatedly been accused in the press of favoring his friends and business partners while a high court magistrate and before that of being the beneficiary of an otherwise mostly senseless road building project when he served in the Moscoso administration. He has repeatedly filed criminal charges and civil lawsuits against journalists for unflattering stories about him, to the point that his own siblings have issued a joint public condemnation of these legal actions and of the conduct underlying the allegedly defamatory reports. In his interview with Noli, Spadafora threatened more criminal defamation charges, this time against La Prensa.

According to a Dichter & Neira poll commissioned and published by La Prensa, 61.3 percent of those surveyed expect that Torrijos will make appointments on the basis of politics rather than professional qualifications. Judging from the president's prior judicial appointments, however, he's likely to find people who, although they may be hardcore partisans, will have academic and professional résumés that indicate that they're well qualified. The Panamanian National Assembly has to approve the appointments, but that body has no tradition of examining nominees remotely like the analogous process in the US Senate and Torrijos has all the votes he needs to get the easy approvals he wants.